HuggingChat alternatives: where to go next
The HuggingChat people remember closed in July 2025 and returned rebuilt. What sits there now, and where else to go, checked on 2 October 2026.
The app most people mean when they type "HuggingChat alternative" into a search box closed on 1 July 2025. Hugging Face's Julien Chaumond announced it on the app's own discussion board under the heading "[ANNOUNCEMENT] 📣 HuggingChat is closing for now", and the sentence under it read "We are closing down huggingchat for now." The reasoning took one line: "Today we are closing it to make room for something new and more integrated with the HF ecosystem." The post credited 27 months of work, Assistants and HuggingChat Tools among it, told users they could "export your past conversations as a Zip file, to load them into another interface", and pointed leavers at LibreChat, Open WebUI and Scira MCP.
Then it came back, rebuilt. On 16 October 2025, Victor Mustar posted "[NEW] HuggingChat Omni" in the same place, opening with "HuggingChat returns and it's smarter and faster than ever". The instruction under that line was "Stop picking models. Start chatting." The post counted "115+ available models" and "15+ providers available", powered by Hugging Face Inference Providers, and set out who could use it: "Available now for all Hugging Face users. Free users can use their inference credits, PRO users get 20x more credits to use."
Start there, because it decides which alternative you are shopping for. If you last used HuggingChat before July 2025 and remember a free open-model playground with Assistants in it, the thing at that address now carries the name and works differently. If you tried the rebuilt one and bounced off it, your reason is probably in how it is metered. Both readers are served below, and every price here comes from the vendor's own page, fetched on 2 October 2026.
The rebuilt app, checked 2 October 2026
The welcome panel we were served reads: "Welcome to HuggingChat, the chat app powered by open source AI models. Omni automatically picks the best AI model to give you optimal answers depending on your requests. You can also choose from any available open source models to chat with directly." The sidebar counts 138 models. A badge over the animation reads "Now with ML Intern!", a mode whose label lists papers, training, spaces, datasets, eval and hub. The rebuilt app is aimed squarely at people who work in machine learning, and it says so on the front door.
Two practical details matter more than the model count. The first is that an account is required. Both huggingface.co/chat/models and huggingface.co/chat/settings served us the same login panel on 2 October 2026, with the line "Log in with your Hugging Face account to use HuggingChat."
The second is how usage is paid for, and this is where the rebuilt app differs most from the one people remember. HuggingChat runs on Hugging Face Inference Providers, and the credit table in Hugging Face's own documentation, checked on 2 October 2026, gives free users "$0.10, subject to change" in monthly credits and PRO users "$2.00", adding that Hugging Face "charges you the same rates as the provider, with no additional fees." The pricing page puts PRO at $9 per month and lists "20× included inference credits" among what that buys. So the free allowance arrives as a monthly balance rather than a number of messages, and what it covers depends on which of the 138 models you choose and how long your threads run. Some people find that clarifying. Others meet it the day the balance runs out, and further use means buying credits.
One more difference between the old app and the live one: the relaunch post's list of what is new covers Omni routing, background generation tracking, faster streaming, polish and speed. Assistants and Tools, the two features the closing post had singled out, do not appear in it.
MultiChats puts the leading AI models in one app. Try it free
What people are usually after when they leave
Very few people leave a chat app over licence politics. They leave over a specific friction, and here the frictions are predictable.
The first is coverage. HuggingChat's entries are Hub checkpoints, which means Qwen, GLM, DeepSeek, Llama, gpt-oss and their neighbours, and it means the commercial flagships people compare against are absent from the list. If your week involves handing one question to an open model and then to Claude or a GPT model to see which reading you trust, no amount of catalogue depth fixes that.
The second is the phone. A chat habit that only exists on a laptop is a weak habit, and this is where a browser-first product asks the most of you. Hugging Face links no mobile app from huggingface.co/chat, so on a phone you get the site.
The third is mentioned last and minded most: whether the conversation will still be there tomorrow, on another device, without an export step. The products here differ on that, and two keep history only where you installed them, so check rather than assume.
None of those three is about open weights. That question gets its own section, kept apart from the practical ones, because running them together is how people end up with a tool that satisfies their principles and none of their Tuesdays.
Where a HuggingChat user plausibly goes next
Every cell below was read on a page the vendor served us on 2 October 2026. Where a figure was not rendered, the cell says so.
Product | What it is for | Price checked 2 October | Open-weight models | Mobile app | History saved |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
HuggingChat | Open-source models Hugging Face hosts, with Omni routing each message | No subscription of its own. A Hugging Face account draws on monthly Inference Providers credits: $0.10 free, "subject to change", or $2.00 on PRO, which is $9 a month | Yes, and only these. The sidebar counts 138, Hub checkpoints plus the Omni router | Not confirmed at that check. None is linked from huggingface.co/chat | Not confirmed at that check. Settings sit behind the login. The closing post offered an export of "past conversations as a Zip file" |
Open WebUI | An interface you install yourself, pointed at whichever provider you like | No consumer price on its site at that check (its /pricing path returned 404). Install is one command, "No account required". Enterprise goes through "Talk to our team" | Yes, via "Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, or anything compatible" | No store download. "Every Open WebUI instance is a Progressive Web App (PWA)", installed from the browser | Yes, on the machine you installed it on. The docs list "Folders, tags, pins" |
LibreChat | The same shape, an open-source platform you host, with agents and MCP connections | No price on its site at that check (its /pricing path returned 404). Local Install and Remote Install guides, plus a hosted demo | Yes, through custom endpoints: "Connect Ollama, Deepseek, Groq, and more" | Not confirmed at that check. The docs call it "a self-hosted web application" and list no store app | Yes, where you host it. The docs list message search over past conversations, plus a Temporary Chat mode that stays out of it |
ChatGPT | OpenAI's own assistant | Free $0, Go $8, Plus $20, Pro from $100, each per month. The Go row adds "This plan may include ads" | Not offered. The plan table names OpenAI's own models: GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Luna, GPT-5.6 Terra | Yes. The plan table lists "Access on web, iOS, Android" under Essentials | Yes. The "Chat history" row reads "Unlimited*" on all four tiers |
Claude | Anthropic's own assistant | Free $0. Pro $17 a month on the annual plan, "$200 billed up front", or $20 monthly. Max "From $100" a month | Not offered. The models named across the plans are Anthropic's own: Mythos, Fable, Opus, Sonnet, Haiku | Yes. "Chat on web, iOS, Android and Desktop" reads Yes on every tier | Yes. "Incognito chats" is the opt-out on every tier, and Projects go from "Up to 5" on Free to "Yes" on Pro |
MultiChats (this is us) | 59 models from 17 providers in one account, chosen by you per message | Free plan with 22 of the models. Pro $20.99 a month or $199.99 a year. Pro+ $34.99 a month or $349.99 a year | Yes, alongside the closed ones. At least 18 of the 59 are published Hub checkpoints, 7 on the free plan | Yes, iOS and Android | Yes, to your account, on whichever device you sign in from |
Three notes on what the table leaves out. Google's consumer plans page now serves figures: on the United States view, Google AI Plus is $4.99 a month, Pro $19.99 and Ultra from $99.99. Gemini gets this note rather than a row, because the same page told us nothing about saved history. On 2 October 2026, LibreChat's homepage carried a banner reading "LibreChat is joining ClickHouse to power the open-source Agentic Data Stack", worth knowing before you commit a self-hosted setup to it. And both self-hosted options need a machine that stays on and somebody to patch it. That is you.
The open-weights part, which is why you were there
Open weights means the lab has published the trained numbers that make a model work, so anyone with suitable hardware can download that file, run it and adjust it. It says nothing about how good the answers are, and it does not mean the copy answering you is running anywhere near you.
That second half is the one HuggingChat quietly proved for three years. Almost nobody using it was running a 400-billion-parameter checkpoint at home. Hugging Face hosted the weights and you typed into a website, with the licence on the model file the only thing that differed from any other hosted chat app. Which means a published checkpoint is not owned by whoever introduced you to it. The same files are served by many hosts, including ones with a phone app and a saved history.
We checked this the other way round, by taking HuggingChat's own served model list and matching it against our active catalogue, most recently on 19 October 2026. Eighteen of our 59 models are on that list, checkpoint for checkpoint: GPT-OSS 120B, Muse Glimmer 30B, DeepSeek V4 Flash, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Qwen3 VL 235B, Qwen3.5 397B, Qwen3.6 35B, Qwen3.8 27B, Kimi K3, Kimi K2.6, GLM 5.3, GLM 5.3 Flash, GLM 5.2, GLM 5, MiniMax M3, MiniMax M2.7, Ling 3.0 Flash and Inkling Small. Seven of those are on the free plan: GPT-OSS 120B, Muse Glimmer 30B, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Qwen3 VL 235B, GLM 5.3 Flash, GLM 5.2 and Ling 3.0 Flash. Three more of ours are on the list as a specific build of the same model: Llama 4 Maverick, Qwen3 235B and Nemotron 3 Ultra.
In our case they sit in the same picker as Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol and Gemini, and you choose which one takes the next message. So the comparison you could not run inside HuggingChat, open model against commercial flagship on your own question, runs inside one thread.
On data, the precise version rather than the comfortable one. We do not train on your conversations. What the provider behind a given model does with them varies by model, and the models where we know of a difference carry a notice on their info card in the picker. Two of the open-weight entries above are among them. GPT-OSS 120B and Llama 4 Maverick reach us through a router, and their cards say so in these words: "Routed via OpenRouter to third-party providers that may briefly retain requests; they do not train on your data." You read that before you send anything.
Moving out: what carries over, and what does not
Hugging Face documented exactly one migration path, in the closing post: "You can export your past conversations as a Zip file, to load them into another interface." Whether the rebuilt app still offers that export we cannot say, because its settings sit behind the login and we will not describe a screen we have not seen.
Be realistic about what an export is worth. No chat app ingests another app's archive and turns it back into live, continuable threads. What you get is a readable record, useful for finding the prompt that worked. Treat the move as a fresh start with a reference file beside it.
Two smaller things. Your Hugging Face account does not follow you, so whatever you sign up with elsewhere is a new login and the credits stay put. Model names mostly do follow you: if Qwen3 VL or a GLM entry was doing your work on HuggingChat, the same checkpoint is reachable from several of the products above, ours included, under a name you will recognise.
Where that leaves the search
If what you wanted was the 2023 HuggingChat, the closing post is Hugging Face's own answer. If what you wanted was the open models it introduced you to, they are more widely reachable now, and the open question has moved from where to find them to which client you want around them: one you install and maintain, one that meters a research-facing catalogue against a credit balance, or one that keeps your history, ships a phone app and lets you put an open model and a commercial flagship on the same question.
We are the third of those. Sign in on the free plan with one of those seven open-weight entries and ask it something you already know the answer to. If you want the paid shape first, the plan comparison is one page.