LM Studio vs Open WebUI

Overview

LM Studio is a desktop app for running local LLMs on your own machine. It downloads models, manages them, and serves them through a local runtime built on MLX (Apple Silicon) and llama.cpp (CPU/GPU). The current release centers on Bionic, LM Studio's agent for open models — built for work, code and document editing, natively local.

Because inference runs on your hardware, prompts, files and voice audio stay on the device unless you explicitly use a cloud feature.

Core capabilities

• Local model library — browse and download open models (including frontier open-weight models such as GLM, Kimi and DeepSeek families) from inside the app.
• Bionic agent — create and edit documents with automatic saving, run coding tasks, build automations and control the computer through an agent loop.
• Real-time voice transcription — talk to Bionic and have speech transcribed locally, with multiple language support; audio never leaves the device.
• OpenAI-compatible local server — expose loaded models on a local endpoint so other tools and SDKs can use them.
• MLX and llama.cpp backends — optimized inference on Apple Silicon and broad GPU/CPU support elsewhere.
• Model and context controls — choose quantization, context length and GPU offload per model.
• Privacy-first design — local processing by default; LM Studio states its cloud services are zero-data-retention.

What it is good at

LM Studio is useful for private coding assistance, offline work, experimenting with open models, prototyping agents without API bills, and running a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint for other applications. It is not a hosted service — performance depends on your hardware and the model size you can fit.

Getting started

1. Download LM Studio for macOS, Windows or Linux.
2. Search the model catalog and download a model that fits your RAM/VRAM.
3. Load the model and chat, or open Bionic for agentic work.
4. Start the local server if another app needs an API endpoint.
5. Adjust context length and GPU offload if you hit memory limits.

Pricing

LM Studio is free to download and use locally. Account-based and cloud features may have their own terms; check lmstudio.ai for current details.

Links

• Website: lmstudio.ai
• Docs: lmstudio.ai/docs
• Bionic docs: lmstudio.ai/docs/bionic

Open WebUI

Open WebUI is a home for AI: an extensible, easy-to-use, self-hosted platform built to run entirely offline. Connect local models through Ollama or use OpenAI-compatible APIs for local and cloud models.

English |
简体中文 |
繁體中文 |
한국어 |
Deutsch |
Español |
Français |
Italiano |
Dansk |
日本語 |
Polski |
Русский |
Bosanski |
العربية |
Norsk |
Português (Brasil) |
ไทย |
Türkçe |
Українська |
বাংলা |
Ελληνικά |
Tiếng Việt

Explore Open WebUI →

Installation

Python

## With uv installed (macOS/Linux)
DATA_DIR=~/.open-webui uvx --python 3.12 open-webui@latest serve

## Or install and run with pip (Python 3.12)
pip install open-webui
open-webui serve

Then open http://localhost:8080.

Docker

docker run -d -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v open-webui:/app/backend/data --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main

Then open http://localhost:3000.

Add these options to docker run before the image name as needed:

See the Docker installation guide for setup instructions and configuration options.

Desktop App

Download the native desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Read the docs →

Ecosystem

• Open Terminal / Terminals (Enterprise): The action layer that turns Open WebUI into a full agent harness, with enterprise orchestration for per-user workspaces.
• Knowledge Base Sync (oikb): Mirror folders, repos, buckets, and wikis into Open WebUI Knowledge Bases with incremental sync.
• Open WebUI Computer: Your computer in any browser: files, editor, terminal, git, and optional AI agents, running on your real machine.

See the ecosystem documentation for details.

Troubleshooting and Updates

See the troubleshooting guide for connection issues and the updating guide to update your installation.

Documentation

See the docs for configuration and usage, and the roadmap for planned work.

For Docker Compose, Kubernetes, and other setups, see the installation docs.

Support

Open an issue or start a discussion.

Find us on Reddit, X, and Discord.

Security

Report vulnerabilities privately through GitHub security advisories. Security reports are accepted only through GitHub.

Star History

License

Includes code under the Open WebUI License, which requires preserving the Open WebUI branding, and prior contributions under their original licenses. See LICENSE and LICENSE_HISTORY for terms and history.

Enterprise · Careers · Sponsor

Created by Timothy Jaeryang Baek.