Character-based chat and storywriting with large language models: TavernAI is the open-source frontend that leaves model choice to you. It generates no text itself; it connects to the backend of your choice - OpenAI (including GPT-4), Anthropic Claude, KoboldAI and KoboldCpp, Oobabooga's Text Generation Web UI, NovelAI, Ollama, and the crowdsourced Horde - so cost, model quality, and content policy are decided by your backend, not the interface. Characters are defined by portable card files in PNG or JSON format with personality, scenario, and example dialogue, and tens of thousands of community-made cards from sites like Chub.ai import directly. Conversations support group chats with multiple characters, a story mode for long-form writing, message swiping to branch between alternative responses, and full editing of any message. World Info injects lore into context when keywords trigger, keeping long roleplays consistent. Themes, custom backgrounds, and configurable generation settings round out the interface. It runs on Node.js, and the SillyTavern project began as a fork of it.

Project AIRI is the most popular open-source AI companion platform — a self-hosted recreation of Neuro-sama that brings AI-powered virtual characters into your world across web, desktop, and mobile. The system renders Live2D, Spine, and VRM 3D character models with auto-blink, eye tracking, and lip-sync driven by real-time voice synthesis, while the xsAI abstraction layer connects to 40+ LLM providers including OpenAI GPT-4, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, and local models via Ollama and OpenRouter. Built from day one on WebGPU, WebAudio, Web Workers, WebAssembly, and WebSocket technologies, the browser version runs entirely client-side with PWA offline support while the server runtime enables persistent memory via PostgreSQL with pgvector embeddings and DuckDB WASM for client-side storage. The Minecraft agent plays autonomously using mineflayer with pathfinding, and a Factorio integration provides cooperative gameplay. Social integrations deploy your companion as a Discord bot joining voice channels, a Telegram bot, and a Twitter/X agent posting and replying autonomously. The desktop Stage Tamagotchi app provides an always-on-screen companion for Windows and macOS, while Stage Pocket brings the experience to mobile. Voice features include client-side speech recognition via VAD, multiple TTS providers including ElevenLabs, and screen vision capabilities. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Your prompts never have to leave the building: TextGen runs open large language models on your own hardware behind a chat interface and an API that speak fluent OpenAI. Load GGUF or Hugging Face weights through llama.cpp, ik_llama.cpp, Transformers, ExLlamaV3, or TensorRT-LLM, and switch models or backends from the interface without restarting the server. Chat mode gives you conversations with characters and system prompts, notebook mode behaves like a familiar completion editor, and both accept image attachments for vision models and documents for context. Models that support tool calling can search the web, fetch pages, and do math through single-file Python tools, and MCP servers plug in for larger tool catalogs. Start it with the API flag and the same model answers at chat, completions, and messages endpoints that mirror OpenAI and Anthropic, complete with streaming, logprobs, embeddings, and optional API key authentication. Portable builds for Linux, Windows, and macOS bundle every dependency, so the distance from download to a running model is an unzip and one shell command. Because everything is local, prompts, documents, and outputs stay on machines you control, and parallel request handling lets a single loaded model serve a whole team's tools at once. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Large language models get a polished front end that can run fully offline: Open WebUI is the self-hosted front end of choice. It talks to local model runners, primarily Ollama, and to any OpenAI-compatible API, so LM Studio, vLLM, Groq, Mistral, OpenRouter, and cloud providers all plug into the same chat interface and can be mixed per conversation. RAG is built in: upload files to knowledge bases or reference them in chat with the # command, backed by a choice of nine vector databases (ChromaDB and PGVector officially maintained) and multiple extraction engines including Tika and Docling, with hybrid BM25-plus-vector search and cross-encoder reranking. Web search results from providers like SearXNG, Brave, and Tavily inject directly into conversations. Extensibility comes from Python tools and functions that run inside the chat, a Pipelines plugin framework, and native MCP support. Multi-user features include RBAC, SSO, and group permissions, and the instance itself exposes an OpenAI-compatible API your own apps can call.

Every major model provider behind one ChatGPT-style interface: LibreChat spans OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure, AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI, Groq, Mistral, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint including local Ollama. You can switch models mid-conversation and compare providers without changing tools. Its Agents framework builds no-code custom assistants with tool access via Model Context Protocol servers, file search over uploaded documents through an optional pgvector-backed RAG service, and a sandboxed Code Interpreter that executes Python, JavaScript, Go, C++, Java, PHP, and Rust. Artifacts render React components, HTML, and Mermaid diagrams directly in chat, and image generation works through DALL-E and other configured providers. Multi-user support is enterprise-grade, with OAuth, SAML, LDAP, and two-factor authentication, per-user conversation history in MongoDB, and Meilisearch-powered search across all messages and files, plus reusable presets, forkable threads, and persistent memory across conversations. The economics favor teams: instead of a ChatGPT Plus seat per person, everyone shares one instance billed per API token, with access to every provider rather than one - and providers see individual API calls, not your accumulated organizational knowledge. Deployment is Docker Compose; API keys and endpoints are configured through .env and librechat.yaml.

Self-hosting a language model is only half the job; people still need somewhere pleasant to talk to it, and Chat UI is that window, the same interface that powers HuggingChat. Point it at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, your own Ollama or llama.cpp server, the Hugging Face router, or a hosted gateway like OpenRouter, and the models it serves appear in the picker automatically, with no per-model configuration. Conversations are saved to your database and stay browsable in the sidebar, so a thread from last week can be reopened, continued, and compared against a fresh answer from another model. Multimodal models accept image uploads right in the composer, and models that support it can call MCP tools mid-conversation to fetch data or run actions. For a shared team deployment, OpenID Connect sign-in keeps individual histories and settings separate, and per-user defaults travel with each account. Everything a consumer chatbot would keep on someone else's servers, prompts, uploaded files, and usage history, stays in the MongoDB you control on the same machine. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache-2.0 licensed.

A private ChatGPT built with Next.js: Lobe Chat is the open-source AI chat interface teams self-host instead. Its main advantage is provider breadth: one interface connects to 40+ model providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Mistral, Groq, AWS Bedrock, Azure, and local models served through Ollama, so you can switch models per conversation and compare outputs. It handles multi-modal work: image recognition, image generation, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text. A plugin system based on function calling and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) adds external tools like web search and code execution. Run it in standalone mode as a single container with settings in browser storage, or in database mode with PostgreSQL and S3-compatible storage for persistent history, multi-user auth, and RAG knowledge bases built from uploaded documents with pgvector retrieval. Because tools arrive through function calling and MCP rather than a proprietary plugin format, custom internal tools can be exposed to the assistant with a standard server over STDIO or HTTP. Hundreds of pre-configured assistant roles import from the community marketplace. For teams the cost model matters: provider API keys billed per token typically undercut a ChatGPT Plus seat per person, and self-hosting keeps API keys, uploaded files, embeddings, and conversation history entirely on your own server.

Thirteen-plus LLM providers, one unified client: NextChat (formerly ChatGPT-Next-Web) is an open-source AI chat interface built on Next.js that spans OpenAI GPT-4, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Groq, Azure endpoints, and self-hosted backends like Ollama, LocalAI, and RWKV-Runner. Its defining trait is minimalism - the first screen loads in about 100 KB, the desktop client is roughly 5 MB, and there is no database or user system to operate; chat history lives locally in the browser with optional WebDAV or UpStash Redis sync. The Mask system saves reusable prompt-template personas you can share and debug, long conversations auto-compress to fit context windows, and Markdown rendering covers LaTeX, Mermaid diagrams, and code highlighting with streaming responses. Plugins add web search and calculators, MCP support enables external tool calling, and Artifacts previews generated content in a separate pane. Ships as a web app, Docker image, and Tauri desktop builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux, translated into 20+ languages. MIT-licensed.

Why should your chat history live on someone else's servers? Chatpad AI - a React/TypeScript front end for the OpenAI API, built on the Mantine component library - is designed around that question. Enter your own OpenAI API key and start chatting with GPT models; every conversation, prompt, and setting is stored locally in your browser via DexieJS over IndexedDB, with no tracking, no cookies, and no backend database at all. That architecture is the point - the Docker image is just Nginx serving static files, making it one of the lightest AI deployments in the catalog, and pay-per-token API pricing typically undercuts a ChatGPT Plus subscription for moderate use. The interface earns its "premium quality" tagline with the details: a persona selector that switches communication styles per conversation, a saved-prompts library for messages you reuse constantly, organized chat history, and full data export/import so conversations move between browsers or into backups as files you control. A JSON config file customizes defaults - models, API endpoints, UI options - without rebuilding the image. AGPL-licensed, with desktop builds available upstream. For teams that want ChatGPT's utility with a self-hosted, zero-telemetry footprint, Chatpad is the minimal, sane answer.

Bring your own API keys and work with OpenAI GPT models, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, Grok, Azure endpoints, and local models in one organized workspace: TypingMind is a unified chat frontend for large language models, replacing a browser tab per provider. Parallel chat sends the same prompt to multiple models and compares answers side by side, and models can be switched mid-conversation. A prompt library stores reusable, tagged prompts with variables, and the AI Agents system builds specialized assistants that bundle a base model, custom instructions, assigned plugins, and uploaded knowledge files for RAG. Plugins extend every connected model with web search, image generation (DALL-E, Stable Diffusion), Deep Research, URL reading via Firecrawl, and Zapier automation - plus MCP server integrations for Notion, Atlassian, and other external tools, and a JavaScript extension API for custom behavior. Chats store locally by default with optional sync. Self-hosting puts the interface on your own domain and, for teams, adds branding, member access limits, and shared prompt and agent libraries.

Somewhere between the brilliant novel idea you had in the shower and the finished manuscript sits a hundred hours of outlining, drafting, and continuity wrangling; Show Me The Story compresses that distance. Start with a synopsis and get a full chapter outline you can review, edit inline, or send back for revision before a single paragraph of prose exists. Once the outline is confirmed, the writing page drafts one chapter at a time with streaming output, then waits for your verdict: accept it, or highlight a passage and request a surgical revision that leaves the rest untouched. Characters, organizations, world rules, and relationships live in structured settings, complete with a relationship graph, and are woven into prompts automatically. A dedicated foreshadow system plans setups and payoffs chapters apart, tracks each thread from planted to resolved, and nudges you when one is overdue. After every chapter, extracted facts and a consistency check guard the story against contradictions, and an optional automatic mode keeps the chapters flowing while you supervise. Finished books can be diagnosed and polished in one pass, then exported as a single text file. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

NarraLume is a writing studio for long novels where the AI proposes and you dispose, so a book stays yours across tens of thousands of words. Everything lives around the story bible: your stated intent, outline, entities, confirmed facts, relationships, chronology, and foreshadowing, kept as the single source of truth that planning, drafting, and review all read from. You can write chapters by hand in the studio, save versions and comments, ask for a selection edit, or delegate a chapter, a run of chapters, or a whole quick-creation plan to a model; whatever comes back arrives as a candidate with diffs, never as silent edits to your manuscript or canon. Review findings come with evidence you can accept, reject, or mark as false positives, and when generated prose collides with a locked fact the task stops and waits for your ruling instead of improvising around it. The run center keeps every AI job's steps, model calls, and checkpoints recoverable, the long-form lab searches story memory and previews plot impact without touching the book, and delivery ends with quality checks, exports, snapshots, and full-library backups. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache-2.0 licensed.