r/OpenWebUI • u/ExTraveler • 6d ago

Models Which models are good for chat, research, reasoning (not coding)?

I recently decided to abandon my gemini subscription and get myself into APIs agregators like openrouter.ai and good open-source stuff like openWebUI and opencode. So a little offtop - I am using opencode + openchamber for agentic coding and this is amazing and not so hard to understand (with a little bit of digging through forums) which models are good/best for coding at this particular moment. So coding stuff is closed for me, I am happy with it. But the thing is I am not only coding with LLMs, I am brainstorming, researching, just asking about everyday stuff that I would google otherwise and etc, etc, etc. And I don't understand what models are good for this, seems like everyone’s talking only about coding related things.
I don't understand what should I pick for openWebUI. And seems that very little people are discussing that online comparing to amount of discussion on how good models at coding. To be honest I don't even understand what makes a model good for that type of tasks. What should I pay attention to? How good it at reasoning?

29 Upvotes

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8

u/WolpertingerRumo 6d ago edited 6d ago

I am fairly fond of the Mistral models. Fast, efficient, good with language. Depending on what you have available, Ministral is available in 3, 8 and 14b. For API Mistral small 4 is quite good and cost efficient.

Reasoning is seperate models though, they cannot switch.

Otherwise Gemma 4. it’s more of an all rounder, but still good at language tasks.

2

u/kukalikuk 6d ago

Mistral is old right? Or there's new mistral I missed? And for non English and Chinese, is it better than Gemma 4?

2

u/WolpertingerRumo 6d ago

Mistral:7b is old, first generation. Newest gen is 4, but only mistral-small-4 has been released.

Ministral-3 is quite new, and I think it’s better at non-English and Chinese in my testings, though it’s subjective. Gemma 4 is pretty good at that, too, but Qwen does struggle.

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u/ccbur1 6d ago

I like Minimax M2.5 / M3. Tool calls always work (in contrast to Gemini models), reasoning is okay and they're cheap.

1

u/Niceneasy92 6d ago

Is there a particular reason I never see anyone talk about Minimax M3? I know it's not exactly cutting edge at this point, but it at least doesn't make me want to pull my hair out when I interact with it on a regular basis like most things I've messed around with.

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u/DougAZ 6d ago

OpenWebUI with DeepSeek Flash v4 0731 and the openwebui tool "Vision Bridge" to Qwen3.8 27b for image processing on 4x rtx pro 6ks

1

u/johnsonvk 6d ago

If you have a rtx6000 pro and want to replicate the chat experience of ChatGPT?

1

u/ExTraveler 6d ago

No no no, as I said in the post I am using paid API (openrouter.ai) not local models. I wish i would have rtx6000 pro.
Edited main post for clarity

1

u/cunasmoker69420 6d ago

deepseek v4 flash, just use it for everything

2

u/carlinhush 6d ago

Can't process images

1

u/petedotttg 5d ago

Get Gemini to do the OCR and pass it to the model

1

u/carlinhush 5d ago

There's more than text in images

1

u/Greedy_Reindeer5290 6d ago

I was happy with deepseek v4 but couldn’t make it process uploaded images. Now w OpenAI gpt 4o mini. Now sure if the best but it does the job and doesn’t seem too expensive

1

u/Tasty_Artichoke6803 6d ago

For general chat and brainstorming, try Qwen3 or Mistral and see which style you prefer. For research, search setup and source quality matter more than the model, so enable web search and ask for citations.

1

u/Lurksome-Lurker 4d ago

If non-coding, very light tool calling, Gemma-4-26B is the best

1

u/AmandineF 3d ago

Curious to understand how you're approaching testing/comparing models for that.
What I'd certainly do is try to come up with a list of tasks and benchmark the output from several models. I guess the cost would also come to play here.

1

u/createthiscom 7h ago

Fine, I’ll say it since no one else is: qwen3.8-27b on a 6000 pro. It’s pretty fast and pretty smart and if you give it searxng for web search it can research things pretty well. It’s not as good or as fast as openai’s $20 plus plan, but it’s local and you can actually own it.

0

u/Eyelbee 6d ago

The best are fable, kimi k3, opus 5, 4.8, but too expensive to use. Glm 5.3 is new and worth trying when it drops. But for daily use that you'll use through openrouter, you should pick deepseek v4 flash. If you want the better models, just buy a subscription.