Flowise vs Open WebUI
Updated April 29, 2026
Overview
Flowise is an open-source drag-and-drop UI for building LLM flows and AI agents. Built on top of LangChain, it lets users visually connect LLMs, prompts, tools, memory, and vector stores into working applications without writing code. Flowise can be self-hosted and is popular with teams that want the power of LangChain with a visual interface.
Open WebUI is the de-facto self-hosted AI chat platform — a feature-rich, extensible web UI that runs entirely offline and supports Ollama, OpenAI-compatible APIs, MCP servers, RAG with 9+ vector databases, voice I/O, and multi-user RBAC. 124K+ GitHub stars, 282M+ downloads.
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- Open-source visual LLM workflow builder
- Drag-and-drop node interface
- LangChain integration
- Custom components
- Self-hosted deployment
- Self-hosted ChatGPT-style UI for Ollama + OpenAI-compatible APIs
- RAG with 9+ vector databases (Chroma, Qdrant, Milvus, Weaviate)
- 15+ web search providers, voice I/O, MCP server integration
- Multi-user RBAC, LDAP/SSO, audit-friendly architecture
- Image generation via DALL-E, Gemini, ComfyUI, AUTOMATIC1111
Strengths and tradeoffs
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
- Low-code
- Open-source
Cons
- Limited control
Pros
- Most-deployed self-hosted ChatGPT clone — 282M+ downloads
- Genuinely enterprise-grade: RBAC, SSO, multi-user from day one
- Massive feature set, all in one Docker container
- MIT license — fully free and modifiable
- Pairs perfectly with Ollama for local-only AI
Cons
- Self-hosting requires infrastructure expertise
- Heavy feature surface can overwhelm casual users
- Less polished than commercial UIs like ChatGPT
- Performance depends on chosen LLM backend
What people are saying
Adds everything Ollama's CLI lacks — conversation history, file uploads for document chat, web search, multi-user accounts, voice I/O, and a lot more.
Read full reviewFlowise or Open WebUI — which should you choose?
Choose Flowise if you wantChoose if you want
- Visual RAG pipeline building
- LLM workflow prototyping
- Custom AI tool creation
- AI application experimentation
- No-code LLM chain building
Choose Open WebUI if you wantChoose if you want
- Self-hosted private ChatGPT replacement for enterprises
- On-prem RAG with internal documents
- Multi-user team-level AI deployments with permissions
- Air-gapped AI environments (regulated industries)
- Local AI workflows powered by Ollama
Compare Flowise and Open WebUI on your own traffic
Respan lets you trace LLM and agent calls across any model or framework, A/B test prompts on production traffic, and route requests across 500+ models through one gateway.