Runtimes & apps Published: Oct 29, 2026

Open WebUI 0.12.5 adds a session explorer for admins, multi-page notes and faster knowledge bases, with security fixes

What happened

Open WebUI v0.12.5 adds a Sessions tab in Admin Analytics that lists each chat with its tokens, responses, errors and time span, and shows its replies and tool calls with timing, as long as ENABLE_ADMIN_CHAT_ACCESS is on. Notes can now hold several pages and subpages and show who else has a note open. Knowledge base commands such as ls, cat and grep no longer load every file's full text, which the project says makes each call up to ten times faster on large knowledge bases, and large documents are now embedded in batches of 1000 chunks by default. The release also fixes inflated token counts for streamed replies and contains security fixes that are not yet listed, with the project strongly recommending an update as soon as possible.

Why it matters locally: Self-hosted Open WebUI deployments should update for the security fixes, and teams with large knowledge bases get faster, lighter document tools on the same hardware.

Three ways to read it

For the market

Per-chat session analytics, admin rotation of user API keys and failure notifications for automations look aimed at IT teams running Open WebUI for a whole company, where it competes with hosted chat workspaces that already ship usage dashboards. Fixing inflated token counts also makes its usage numbers more usable for internal cost reports.

In plain words

Open WebUI is a free AI chat app that many offices run on their own server. This update patches security holes, lets the person in charge see how each conversation went, and lets notes be split into pages like a notebook with tabs.

For practitioners

Update first for the unlisted security fixes. On large knowledge bases, the lighter ls/cat/grep calls and RAG_EMBEDDING_BUFFER_SIZE (default 1000 chunks) should cut memory spikes during ingestion; query and content prefixes for embedding models can now be set in Admin Settings > Documents instead of only through environment variables. The session explorer needs ENABLE_ADMIN_CHAT_ACCESS, so check that against your privacy policy before turning it on.