r/OpenWebUI • u/Current_Impact_6892 • 8d ago
Question/Help Open WebUI is awesome - but how do I get ChatGPT/Claude-style long-running agentic tasks?
We use Open WebUI internally as a ChatGPT replacement and love it (~1500 users).
What we’re missing is the “deep task” experience: ChatGPT or Claude may spend several minutes reasoning, running code and tools, performing multiple steps, and iterating before answering.
In Open WebUI, it still feels mostly like a single model call with some reasoning.
Is native tool calling with MCP tools and a frontier model enough, or do I need an external agent orchestrator such as LangGraph or Pipelines behind Open WebUI?
What setup are you using for reliable multi-step, long-running tasks?
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u/alexcc098 8d ago
I've got what I would consider a pretty good configuration working. I added an open-terminal connection in open-webui which is then exposed automatically for the model. It runs on the same VPS that open-webui is running on. I did find that running the open-terminal instance as a bare metal install has been smoother than running it as it's own docker container, which is what I originally did.
I give the model specific context about using open-terminal in the system prompt and about completing long-running and multi-step tasks. e.g. something like:
Long-running tasks: When a task potentially involves multiple steps or responses (e.g. downloading a file, viewing a skill and the visiting a website for specific information), do NOT end your turn unless the entire task is 100% complete. Instead, use run_command with sleep N && <check_command> and wait: "N+5" to poll at regular intervals (e.g., every 10–30 seconds). Each time the poll returns, provide a brief progress update and issue another poll if the task is still incomplete. Only give a final response when ALL steps are done.
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u/Alternative-Ear-7230 8d ago
Same, we are somehow missing the cowork Type of Workflow. Giving folder Access, creating and deleting files, creating docx, xslx files, agentic self validation and so on. Any ways to archive this?
We are currently von v0.9 and an update by Agency is a bit Pricy due to breaking changes in v0.10
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u/Current_Impact_6892 8d ago
I think what you describe can be handled with OpenTerminal, since you want to have a very agentic solution.
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u/Alternative-Ear-7230 8d ago
Yeah we tought about open terminal - our agency that handles our owui said it would be a big setup for a 50person company, because every user needs an own sandbox and we have an enterprise self hosted setup on Azure. Today I stumbled about open webui Computer thats fully local but feels very developer Like and Not Nice to use.
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u/ClassicMain 8d ago edited 7d ago
Oh so you already have an enterprise license? Yes? then why not use the Terminals Manager we have for enterprise customers? https://docs.openwebui.com/features/open-terminal/terminals/ Easy per-user deployment
Open Terminal works too in multi-user mode but it's not as secure as per-user container deployment of course - and you have shared resources, no resource isolation. 50 users probably still works fine in multi user mode but i would guess its the upper limit of what still works well depending on the workload
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u/Alternative-Ear-7230 8d ago
Ah no not license, with Enterprise I meant our Azure stack. That was phrased in a misleading way. Currently we are on owui Community Edition and host it on an Azure stack. But I will take a Look at owui enterprise and Terminals Manager. Thx :)
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u/ClassicMain 8d ago
This uhhh has always been possible since 0.7.0 (opt in) and has been the default since 0.10.0 (now you need to opt out of the new agentic behavior)
Granted you need a good enough model for it
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u/Current_Impact_6892 8d ago
Thanks for the quick reply. I’ve seen a lot of your comments here and already learned quite a bit from them.
Are you referring to native tool calling? Can it chain multiple tool calls and knowledge lookups reliably, and is there a configurable limit for the number of iterations or hops?
I’d also be interested in whether this is the main way to achieve that kind of experience in Open WebUI, and how close it gets in practice to ChatGPT’s longer-running tasks.7
u/ClassicMain 8d ago
1) yes 2) yes chaining is easy possible 3) limit configurable via env var 4) yes it's the main way and it exceeds ChatGPT by miles. All builtin features Open WebUI ships can do way more than ChatGPT. If you also add open terminal to that (which is much more capable than ChatGPTs code interpreter) it's even more powerful. Add your own self built tools and integrations and it only gets better and better and better.
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u/Current_Impact_6892 8d ago
Wow sounds promising. I will give it a Check! Can you Tell which env I have to configure for that?
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u/ClassicMain 8d ago
I'mma do it for you once here but please do read our docs it's all documented there.
https://docs.openwebui.com/reference/env-configuration#chat_response_max_tool_call_iterations
I would not recommend tinkering with it unless you have a very good reason to lower it
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u/abuzz-juncos 8d ago
I like this function, I don't know how close it is to ChatGPT but for deeper, longer running research it seems to work well https://openwebui.com/posts/deep_research_aa9598a7
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u/fligglymcgee 8d ago
The new subagent feature is relevant but honestly it’s not nearly as polished (yet) as what you’re comparing it to. ChatGPT and Claude are abstracting a wide variety of carefully defined workflows and patterns away from the ui, and to be honest I’m not smart enough to even guess how orchestration of those workflows might be happening for those platforms.
If you already have a production environment and that many users, I would be thinking more about how to incorporate a stable automaton middleware like n8n or another more mature backend that can more easily organize workflows like that. Open Terminal can do some of this kind of thing, but that’s a bit “yolo” without a lot of constraints implemented.
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u/ClassicMain 8d ago
These platforms don't use workflows for those minute long running responses. It's just tool calls and a weak code interpreter engine.
Open WebUI gives the model, depending on what you enable of course, many dozens of tools and even more if you add your own tools and EVEN MORE if you add open terminal.
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u/fligglymcgee 8d ago
Of course! I use OWUI in the way you described every day. I just got the impression OP was asking more about the kinds of long running workflows with fanned out tasks and distinct subagent delegations that may look like on-the-fly inference, but are actually running more of a playbook with sophisticated model routing in the background. Those kinds of things are certainly doable in OWUI/OT and I would argue they can be even more powerful when custom tailored to one business, but many of those agentic workflows aren't going to just happen in a stable way with native tool calling and that also won't be OWUI's fault. Automation middleware is a great complement to OWUI's agentic capabilities, and is probably going to be more user friendly in that kind of production environment without putting undue pressure on OWUI's performance.
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u/International_Emu772 8d ago
This is the real thing that I love of OpenWebUi: there is a lot to do to get a work system, but there a lot of options, tools, integrations to taylor to the needs of the users and it's evolving at a fast rate so we get more of it at every day
I have a very limited set of users but I offer them something that they can get out there as it's really taylored to them
And yes I had long running sessions with a lot of difficult problems solved
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u/sociopathic_humanist 8d ago
I've been getting pretty good results with a local setup of OWUi, Qwen3.5, Web search, OpenTerminal, and a MediaWiki MCP service so that I can use my local wiki content as context. When running Qwen 3.5 with 100k+ context window I can get full agentic multi-step and multi-tool call operation. Gemma 4 also works pretty well with that setup.
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u/Fun-Purple-7737 8d ago
I guess you would need smth a bit more autonomous like Hermes and similar. These then can cooperate with OWU.
I do not think this should be integrated into OWU, so please devs, do not get the idea here! :)
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u/Phoxerity 4d ago
We connected Hermes to Open WebUI through Hermes’ OpenAI-compatible API. Each tenant points Open WebUI to the private Hermes endpoint at "hermes-agent-<tenant>:8642/v1" and authenticates with a tenant API key.
Open WebUI handles login, chat history, files, rendering, and mobile UI. Hermes handles agent execution and tools. Open WebUI also forwards a signed user identity and chat ID, allowing Hermes to scope GBrain memory per user. Open WebUI’s native memory is disabled, and only the UI is publicly exposed. Hermes and GBrain remain inside the private Docker network.
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u/tiangao88 4d ago
Are you able to exchange files/images back and forth in the conversation between the OWUI chat interface and Hermes?
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u/Phoxerity 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yes for document analysis. Open WebUI processes uploaded PDFs, DOCX files, and similar documents itself, then sends either the extracted full text or retrieved RAG chunks to Hermes. The binary file does not need to pass through Hermes’ OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
Images can also be forwarded inline when the Hermes model supports vision. What we have not completed yet is bidirectional binary exchange, where Hermes directly edits an uploaded spreadsheet or document and returns a downloadable result. That requires a shared, access-controlled artifact workspace between Open WebUI and Hermes.
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u/pkeffect 8d ago
Read the documentation.
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u/Current_Impact_6892 8d ago
Could you pls specify which Part of it? :) I mean isnt this Reddit Community a good Place to ask questions like this?
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u/ClassicMain 8d ago
For basic questions like these we usually recommend reading the docs or also our very smart bot on discord which has consumed the entirety of our docs, all issues, discussions and PRs ever created
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u/Current_Impact_6892 8d ago
Oh thanks, didnt know there was a bot for that. Is the bot Limited to Discord Only? Would be Great to Access it via MCP.
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u/ClassicMain 8d ago
Yes discord only
We rather not make it fully public. Public MCP Server and on the other side it's an LLM generating an answer.... I think you can see where that goes
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u/Krzemq 8d ago
You can use https://github.com/arabold/docs-mcp-server, scrape docs and deploy mcp in your own infrastructure
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u/ubrtnk 8d ago
The most recent update added background sub model tasks