LobeChat is an open-source, beautifully designed chat client that connects to any model and turns conversations into shareable artifacts and knowledge bases.
LobeChat has become one of the most popular open-source AI chat interfaces worldwide. It supports an exhaustive range of model providers โ OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and dozens of Chinese and local runtimes โ behind a single polished UI with TTS voices, vision input, and plugin calling. Its knowledge-base feature ingests documents and sites into retrieval collections, while the artifacts system renders charts, documents, and web apps generated in chat. Every conversation can be published as a shareable page or a full one-click deployment. Self-hosting is a first-class path: a single container yields a private, multi-user AI workspace with local model support through Ollama and other runtimes. The project’s plugin ecosystem adds live data, web browsing, and art generation to chats, and its mobile-friendly web app means a self-hosted deployment serves every device without extra clients.
The software is free and open source under the Apache-style license, so self-hosting costs only your infrastructure. The hosted cloud service offers a free tier with optional paid plans for higher model usage and team features.
Developers and privacy-minded users who want a self-hosted AI workspace, teams standardizing one interface across many model providers, and creators who want to publish chat-generated artifacts as shareable pages. It is ideal for households and small teams standardizing on one interface while experimenting with many providers and keeping transcripts under their own control.