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Comment by jonahbenton | Hacker News Reader

OpenWebUI is what you are looking for from a usability perspective. Supports many models chat.

Last I tried OpenWebUI (A few months ago), it was pretty painful to connect non-OpenAI externally hosted models. There was a workaround that involved installing a 3rd party "function" (or was it a "pipeline"?), but it didn't feel smooth.

Is this easier now? Specifically, I would like to easily connect anthropic models just by plugging in my API key.

The trick to this is to run a LiteLLM proxy that has all the connections to whatever you need to connect to and then point Open-WebUI to that.

I've been using this setup for several months now (over a year?) and it's very effective.

The proxy also benefits pretty much any other application you have that recognizes an OpenAI-compatible API. (Or even if it doesn't)

No, still the same, otoh, it works perfectly fine for Claude, and that is the only one I use. I just wished they would finally add native support for this ...

I tried LibreChat and OpenWebUI, between the two I would recommend OpenWebUI.

It feels a bit less polished but has more functions that run locally and things work better out of the box.

My favorite thing is that I can just type my own questions / requests in markdown so I can get formatting and syntax highlighting.

OpenWebUI refuses to support MCP and uses an MCP to OpenAPI proxy which often doesn't work. If you don't like or need MCP, then it is a good choice.

> refuses to support MCP

Why is that? Seems the way to go to add tooling to any LLM that is tool-capable

The dev is very opinionated

Does https://github.com/open-webui/mcpo/ not fill this gap?

That is the initially mentioned MCP to OpenAPI proxy.

EDIT: To add a bit, MCP is more than just tools, which is the only use case MCPO supports.

Another +1 for OpenWebUI. Development is also going really fast <3

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