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ToolsTue, May 5, 2026· 3 min read

Open WebUI crosses 1M monthly active users

The Ollama front-end hit 1M MAU this month, passing several hosted AI products on GitHub stars. Local AI is no longer a hobbyist niche.

Open WebUI — the ChatGPT-style browser interface for Ollama and OpenAI — crossed 1M monthly active users this month. The project now has 42k GitHub stars, more than several paid AI products that launched with millions in backing.

The growth pattern is different from most dev tools. About 60% of installs are single-user setups on personal machines. The other 40% are small-team self-hosted instances — companies running it on an internal server so the whole team can share a Llama 3 instance without each person needing their own hardware.

What’s new in Open WebUI 0.4

Native RAG — drag in a PDF, it chunks and indexes it, you can ask questions about it.
Web search integration — hook up SearxNG or Brave Search for grounded answers.
Image generation — Stable Diffusion and DALL-E via a single toggle.
Vision model support — drag-and-drop images when using llava or llama3.2-vision.
Function calling — add tools (weather, calculator, search) that the model can invoke.

The project is MIT-licensed. The team sells a hosted cloud version ($0 for individuals, $10/seat for teams) but the self-hosted version has no feature gates.

Open WebUI crosses 1M monthly active users

What’s new in Open WebUI 0.4

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