LLM Personal Assistant on GitHub in 2026: Open WebUI (148k Stars) vs Khoj vs LocalAI - Top Self-Hosted Assistants

Open WebUI (147,900 stars), Khoj (36,218) and LocalAI (48,248) are the top self-hosted LLM assistants on GitHub - here is what each is best at and how to run them in an afternoon.

💡 What You Will Learn

Open WebUI (147,900 stars), Khoj (36,218) and LocalAI (48,248) are the top self-hosted LLM assistants on GitHub - here is what each is best at and how to run them in an afternoon.

## The short answer **Open WebUI** (147,900 stars) is the most popular self-hosted ChatGPT interface: chat with Ollama or OpenAI-compatible models, plus RAG, web search, multi-user support and a plugin marketplace. **Khoj** (36,218 stars, AGPL-3.0) is the "second brain" that indexes your documents, notes and calendar. **LocalAI** (48,248 stars, MIT) is a drop-in OpenAI API replacement that runs everything - LLMs, vision, audio, image - on your hardware. ## Quick start - Open WebUI + Ollama ```bash docker run -d -p 3000:8080 -v open-webui:/app/backend/data -e OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://host.docker.internal:11434 --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main ``` 1. Install Ollama (177,825 stars) and pull a model: `ollama pull qwen2.5:7b` 2. Open http://localhost:3000, create an admin account. 3. Start chatting - or enable the built-in RAG by uploading documents in the chat. ## Which assistant for you | Tool | Stars | Best at | Setup | |:-----|------:|:--------|:------| | Open WebUI | 147,900 | Chat UI, multi-user, RAG | 15 min | | Khoj | 36,218 | Personal knowledge search | 30 min | | LocalAI | 48,248 | OpenAI API drop-in, all modalities | 20 min | ## Real numbers - Open WebUI runs on a 16GB machine with an 8B model; supports offline mode. - Khoj has native apps for Android/iOS/desktop and syncs Obsidian/Notion. - LocalAI serves ~20-40 tokens/sec for 7-8B models on CPU - enough for personal use. ## FAQ **Q: Which is best for a beginner?** A: Open WebUI - one Docker command, browser UI, works with Ollama out of the box. **Q: Can I use all three together?** A: Yes - LocalAI as the model backend, Open WebUI as the chat frontend, and Khoj for document search. **Q: Do I need a GPU?** A: No - all three work on CPU, just slower. A 7-8B quantized model on CPU gives usable response times.