HuggingChat is shutting down (for now)

I have bittersweet news to share. 😢

We are closing down huggingchat for now.

Huggingchat was launched in April 2023 when ChatGPT was just 5 months old and it was still quite hard to deploy a similar service. The goal of this app was to showcase that it was now possible to build an open source alternative to ChatGPT, building on top of the community's models and building blocks. 💪

We also built Huggingchat as a testbed to optimize inference which led to the creation of text-generation-inference which in turn led to HF contributions to SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp, and other LLM runtime engines since then.

In the past 27 months we've launched:

• 🧙 Assistants, an easy way to bundle a prompt, a model, and some tools into an easily-shareable URL you can send your friends
• 🛠️ HuggingChat Tools, exposing the full ecosystem of Gradio Spaces straight from within the chat interface
• 💬 Many model launches were supported on HuggingChat: from OpenAssistant, all the LLamas, Phi-4, to Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemma.... 🔥

The app has always been free and experimental. Today we are closing it to make room for something new and more integrated with the HF ecosystem. You can export your past conversations as a Zip file, to load them into another interface.

If you are looking for a cool alternative interface you should take a look at:

• LibreChat a clean and simple yet feature-packed chat interface
• openwebui – does it even need an intro anymore?
• Scira MCP, an up and coming MCP-centric chat interface

Finally, chat-ui (the codebase powering HuggingChat) is still maintained (GitHub repo).
You can 1-click deploy your own instance using the Chat UI Spaces Docker template.

What's happening to huggingchat  😢 ?

I hope it's not too long.

Also, how do I export my past conversations?

Hi everyone! 👋

This is also my last week at Hugging Face and I'm currently working on a simple page to let you export your personal data & conversation history from HuggingChat so you can reuse it on other platforms in the future. Let me know if you have any questions, I'm always happy to answer them.

It was a pleasure building this app for y'all 🫡

Thats sad.

I wished this never happened

For those looking for alternatives:

1. https://chat.qwen.ai/
2. https://chat.deepseek.com/sign_in

They both release open weights models on a continuous basis so I'm willing to let them use my data for personal training (just remember to never feed sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers into ANY chat service).

I want to caution people that these are hosted by the People's Republic of China, who will absolutely eavesdrop and spy on you harder than any of the Five Eyes nations ever would.

But honestly, the Chinese models are better than the American ones in a lot of ways. Which, again, is a big reason why losing a privacy-respecting provider like HuggingChat sucks so much.

@camypaj it's not about your prev dls being unauthenticated. They're usually just URL/temporary URL based, that you can copy the link and download from another browser/downloader from even another device (not logged in). But in this instance that would be disastrous for privacy if your shared link can download your data to other users, while that's unlikely to happen, they can't allow that.

Thank you huggingchat team for your contribution all of this time, this services was very amazing. Now for the subtitue, did anyone here actually manage to find one? I mean these alternative sites provided is significantly harder to set up, trying librechat but keep getting error 405 for cohere with api key.

Is there a way to duplicate this space privately? I tried duplicating, and it just said "Error, we're working on fixing this". It said I need three pieces of info (DOTENV, etc.) to duplicate the space.

I'll upgrade to Pro if there's a way to do this...

FFFFFFFFFF
(Paying Respect)

I'll miss it, even though recently it wasn't up-to-date with best models, but it was a beautiful tool from a lovable company.

Now for the subtitue, did anyone here actually manage to find one? I mean these alternative sites provided is significantly harder to set up, trying librechat but keep getting error 405 for cohere with api key.

As I put in the other discussion thread, there isn't one. Nothing like HuggingChat.

Everywhere else you either need to pay, or bring your own API key (again, paying) or just serves as a frontend UI. Free tiers elsewhere are pathetically low (again, unless you pay). HuggingChat seemed to allow endless use, only limited by the context size.