Comment by ojosilva

I've been in the same quest for a while. Here's my list, not a recommendation or endorsement list, just a list of alternative clients I've considered, tried or am still evaluating:

- chatbox - https://github.com/chatboxai/chatbox - free and OSS, with a paid tier, supports MCP and local/remote, has a local KB, works well so far and looks promising.

- macai - https://github.com/Renset/macai simple client for remote APIs, does not support image pasting or MCP or anything really, very limited, crashes.

- typingmind.com - web, with a downloadable (if paid) version. Not OSS, but one-time payment, indie dev. One of the first alt chat clients I've ever tried, not using it anymore. Somewhat clunky gui, but ok. Supports MCP, haven't tried it it.

- Open WebUI - deployed for our team so that we could chat through many APIs. Works well for a multi-user web-deployment, but image generation hasn't been working. I don't like it as a personal client though, buggy sometimes but gets frequent fixes fortunately.

- jan.ai - it comes with popular models pre-populated listed, which makes it harder to plug into custom or local model servers. But it supports local model deployment within the app (like what ollama is announcing) which is good for people who don't want to deal with starting a server. I haven't played with it enough, but I personally prefer to deploy a local server (ie ollama, litellm...) and then just have the chat gui app give me a flexible endpoint configuration for adding custom models to it.

I'm also wary of evil actors deploying chat GUIs just to farm your API keys. You should be too. Use disposable api keys, watch usage, refresh with new keys once in a while after trying clients.