Best Open Source AI Chat in 2026
Conversational AI assistants and chatbot tools for answering questions, generating content, and automating tasks.
The most popular pick this year is Ollama with 171,246 GitHub stars, but all 3 options below are worth considering depending on your needs.
3 open source ai chat — ranked by GitHub stars. Browse all
Ollama
Get up and running with Llama 3.3, DeepSeek-R1, Phi-4, Gemma 3, Mistral Small 3.1 and other large language models.
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Open WebUI
User-friendly AI Interface (Supports Ollama, OpenAI API, ...)
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Lobe Chat
🤯 Lobe Chat - an open-source, modern design AI chat framework. Supports multiple AI providers (OpenAI / Claude 4 / Gemini / DeepSeek / Ollama / Qwen), Knowledge Base (file upload / RAG ), one click install MCP Marketplace and Artifacts / Thinking. One-click FREE deployment of your private AI Agent application.
ChatGPTHow we rank these tools
Tools are ranked by GitHub stars as a proxy for community adoption and trust. Stars reflect how many developers found a project valuable enough to bookmark — a reasonable signal for quality in the open source world. We only list tools that are actively maintained and open source.
Looking for tools you can run yourself? Browse self-hosted ai chat →