// the find
chatboxai/chatbox
Powerful AI Client
Chatbox is a cross-platform desktop (and mobile) client that lets you plug in your own API keys for OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Ollama, and others. It's for developers and power users who want a persistent, local-first chat interface without paying a SaaS subscription or sending data through a third-party proxy. The community edition is GPLv3; there's a separate pro version that syncs code back periodically.
Local-first data storage — conversations stay on disk, not on some company's server. Ollama support means you can run the whole stack offline with local models. The provider abstraction is genuinely broad: the OAuth flow covers Anthropic, OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, and a few others with PKCE, not just static API keys. RAG support for session attachments (chunking, embedding, retrieval) is a non-trivial feature for a desktop chat client.
The community/pro split is a red flag for open-source sustainability — the README admits code is synced from a closed pro repo, which means the community edition will always lag and some features will never appear. The test coverage is thin for the surface area: a handful of test files against a large renderer codebase means regressions are a matter of when, not if. The knowledge-base feature has three different parser implementations (local, MinerU, remote) with no clear documentation on when each fires — someone integrating this will spend time reading source code. No end-to-end tests for the Electron layer; the .feature files in /features appear to be specs without corresponding test runners.