Open-source LM Studio alternatives

Open WebUI is a self-hosted web interface for working with large language models. It connects to Ollama for local models and to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so one deployment can front LM Studio, Groq, Mistral, OpenRouter, vLLM and similar backends side by side. It is designed to keep working fully offline when you rely only on local models.

Administrators get role-based access control with user groups and per-group permissions, which suits shared team or household installs. Beyond chat there is retrieval-augmented generation over your documents, custom models that bundle instructions, tools and knowledge into agents, and an extension system made of filters, actions, pipes, tools and skills. External services attach through MCP, MCPO and OpenAPI tool servers, and an optional Open Terminal feature gives agents a filesystem to work in.

You can install it with pip, uv or Docker, or deploy it to Kubernetes using kubectl, kustomize or Helm, and container images are tagged for bundled Ollama and for CUDA. The project lists an enterprise plan for organizations that want vendor support. Its license is listed as custom rather than a standard one, so review the terms before reselling or rebranding it.

AnythingLLM is an all-in-one AI application for chatting with your own documents and automating work with AI agents. It runs locally by default, lets you connect local or cloud language models, and is written in JavaScript under the MIT license. The README describes it as a way to build a private, fully featured assistant in the style of ChatGPT.

Vector databases, document processing pipelines, multi-user support and agents all come included. Newer features listed include dynamic model routing based on rules you define, automatic and user-managed memories, scheduled tasks with agent capabilities, skill selection, a no-code agent builder, MCP compatibility and multi-modal support for both closed and open-source models.

It is available as a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux, as a Docker version that adds multi-user access control, and as a hosted instance, and there is an open-source Android app. Administrators can control access and experience per user. It suits individuals and teams who want a private document-chat and agent workspace without much setup.

Jan is an open-source desktop application that serves as a ChatGPT alternative you control. It can download and run language models such as Llama, Gemma, Qwen and GPT-oss from Hugging Face entirely on your own computer, so conversations stay private and work without an internet connection.

When you want more capability than local hardware allows, Jan can connect to cloud models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Groq, MiniMax and others from the same interface. You can create custom assistants for specific tasks, and Model Context Protocol support adds agentic abilities. A built-in local server on localhost port 1337 exposes an OpenAI-compatible API, so other applications can use your local models as a drop-in backend.

Jan is built with Rust and Tauri and ships installers for Windows, macOS and Linux in deb and AppImage form. Its license is listed as 'Other' on GitHub, so check the repository terms before redistributing it. It is meant for people who want local AI with a polished interface rather than a command line.

TextGen is a desktop application for running large language models on your own machine. It provides a chat interface and an API, collects no telemetry, and keeps conversations on the local computer. Portable builds for Linux, Windows and macOS include all dependencies and come in CUDA, Vulkan, ROCm and CPU-only variants, so a user can download, unzip and launch it.

Chat modes include instruction-following, chat-instruct and character chat, with prompts formatted by Jinja2 templates. The app handles vision input, file attachments such as PDFs and .docx documents, message editing and conversation branching, plus a notebook tab for free-form generation. It supports several backends, including llama.cpp, Transformers, ExLlamaV3 and TensorRT-LLM, and models can be switched without restarting.

An OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API with tool calling lets it stand in locally for those services. Tools are single Python files, and MCP servers are supported. Additional features include LoRA fine-tuning and image generation. TextGen is released under the AGPL-3.0 license.