What is the best self-hosted ChatGPT alternative for a business?
Pair a strong open-weight model with a self-hosted chat interface. A common stack is Open WebUI for the chat experience, connected to a local inference server that runs a large open model from the DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen or GLM families. Employees get a ChatGPT-like experience, and every prompt and document stays on company hardware.
The chat interface handles accounts, chat history, document upload and search over your files. Open WebUI and LibreChat are popular open-source options.
Model size drives quality. A small model on one laptop will disappoint people used to ChatGPT. A frontier-class open model needs several hundred gigabytes of memory, which is where a cluster comes in.
Run a pilot with real users and real tasks before rolling it out.
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