Open WebUI advanced features: RAG, agents, and tools

Open WebUI interface showing RAG and agent features

Most people install Open WebUI, chat a little, and never touch the good stuff. Three features deserve your time.

First, pipes and functions: small Python snippets that run inside the chat pipeline. You can add web search, call outside APIs, or filter model output without touching the model itself. Second, knowledge bases with tunable retrieval: upload your documents and adjust chunk size and embedding models until the answers cite the right passages. Third, model routing: connect several backends and switch models mid-conversation based on the task.

Back up your pipes and functions. They live in the Open WebUI data directory, and losing a tuned retrieval pipeline to a reinstall is a painful lesson most people learn once.

None of this changes your hardware math much. The embedding model used for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is tiny next to the chat model. What raises video memory (VRAM) pressure is vision and image features, so budget a few extra gigabytes if you use those. Size for your largest model, keep headroom, and move on. Check what fits on your GPU first.

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