Bolnee-Chat
Self-hosted, open-source RAG chatbot you can embed on your business website with a 2-line script, with no vendor lock-in or per-message fees.
🔗 Visit Bolnee-Chat
Description
Adding an AI chatbot to a business website usually means picking a SaaS platform, connecting your knowledge base, and then paying a recurring fee that scales with the number of conversations — which gets expensive fast once a chatbot actually starts getting used. Bolnee-Chat is the self-hosted alternative: you run it yourself, connect any OpenAI-compatible model (including free/cheap ones like Groq or a local Ollama model), and pay only for the compute, not per message.
Bolnee-Chat is an open-source, self-hosted chatbot builder using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). You train it by crawling a website or uploading documents, and it answers visitor questions grounded in that content. It works with any OpenAI-compatible API — OpenRouter, Groq, Ollama, vLLM — so you're not locked into one model provider. It includes a dashboard that groups visitor conversations and lets you export them, and it embeds into any site with a two-line JavaScript snippet. The stack is React 19, TypeScript 5.8, Vite 6, Tailwind CSS, Express, and SQLite. It's MIT-licensed and actively maintained.
💬 Our review
The short version: if you want a website chatbot without committing to a SaaS platform's per-conversation pricing, Bolnee-Chat gives you the same RAG-powered chat experience for the cost of hosting it yourself, which is worth it once your traffic is high enough that a subscription would actually cost more.
Hosted competitors like Chatwoot, Tawk.to, and Botpress are easier to get running (no server to manage) and come with polished support tooling, but they charge monthly per agent or per conversation volume, which adds up for a business with meaningful chat traffic. Bolnee-Chat's tradeoff is the opposite: no recurring platform fee, model flexibility (including free tiers via Groq or a local model), but you're responsible for hosting, updates, and security yourself. Worth it for a technical team that wants to control cost and data; not worth it for a non-technical business that just wants chat support running today without touching a server. <!-- ai-generated -->
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Open source (MIT), auto-hébergé — coût réel = hébergement + modèle LLM choisi
Pros
auto-hébergé, aucun coût par conversation ou par mois
compatible avec n'importe quelle API OpenAI-compatible (y compris modèles gratuits/locaux)
intégration en 2 lignes de JavaScript
tableau de bord avec regroupement et export des conversations
open source MIT, activement maintenu
Cons
nécessite de gérer soi-même l'hébergement, la sécurité et les mises à jour
pas de support client officiel type SaaS
moins polie/complète que des plateformes établies comme Chatwoot pour l'instant