
OpenUI
Open standard for generative UI, so agents answer with interface
About OpenUI
OpenUI is an open standard for generative UI: a way for AI apps and agents to respond with an interactive interface rather than a wall of prose. Ask a travel assistant for a hotel and a text model returns six paragraphs; with OpenUI the same model returns hotel cards with amenities, a highlights panel and booking buttons. One spec renders in React, Vue, Svelte, Angular and Lynx, and it works with any model, any agent framework and any design system or component library you already use.
It is worth being precise about the word standard. OpenUI is written and maintained by Thesys Inc., which also sells the two commercial layers around it, and there is no second independent implementer today, so in practice this is one company's framework carrying a standard's name. The framework itself is MIT licensed, self-hostable anywhere, with no usage limits imposed by the vendor, and it is a genuinely sustained project rather than a spike: the repository was created in December 2024 and is pushed to daily, with over 13,400 stars and a reported seven million package downloads. The vendor claims OpenUI Lang generates up to 3 times faster and uses 67% fewer tokens than JSON-based UI formats, which is their own benchmark on their own format. The commercial layers are Gateway, which is shipping, and Observability, which is waitlist-only and free while in early access.
You scaffold a project with a single pnpx command and add OpenUI to the agent code you already have, with no rewrite: it plugs into the Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, LangGraph, Convex, Cloudflare, CrewAI, n8n and Haystack. Your model returns a spec in OpenUI Lang rather than free text, and the client renderer turns that spec into real components from whichever design system you point it at, whether that is the OpenUI design system, shadcn/ui, Material UI, Ant Design, Radix, Chakra, Mantine or daisyUI. The same spec renders across web frameworks, so one implementation covers React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Nuxt, Remix and Astro. For production you can route calls through Gateway, which keeps your existing Chat Completions or Responses SDK, repairs invalid model output as it streams before a user sees it, fails over to another provider during an outage while holding the same model, and reports where usage and spend go. Gateway works on your own provider keys, with no token markup.
- •One Spec, Many Frameworks - A single response format rendered in React, Vue, Svelte, Angular and Lynx, so a UI contract is written once rather than per client
- •Model and Stack Agnostic - Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, xAI, Mistral, Qwen and Ollama, hosted or local, and drops into existing agent frameworks without a rewrite
- •Your Own Design System - Renders through shadcn/ui, Material UI, Ant Design, Radix, Chakra, Mantine, daisyUI or your in-house components rather than a fixed look
- •Output Repair - Gateway catches invalid model output and fixes it mid-stream before it reaches a user, with every repair call included in the plan
- •Provider Failover - Gateway switches providers during an outage while keeping the same model, using your existing credentials and commitments
- •Published Overage Pricing - Per-call overage is on the pricing page at $0.002 on Build and $0.001 on Grow, rather than hidden behind a sales call
- •MIT Licensed Core - The framework is free forever, self-hostable anywhere, with no usage limits from the vendor
Teams building AI products where the answer is something a user has to act on: booking, filtering, comparing, filling in a form, reading a chart. It is the clearest fit for developers already shipping an agent in React or Next.js who want its replies to become interface without hand-writing a renderer per response type, and for anyone who needs the output to match a design system they already maintain. Gateway is aimed at production traffic rather than prototypes, since the free tier's 3,000 calls a month is closer to a demo allowance than a working one, which makes $59 a month the real entry price for a live app. It is not for you if you need a vendor-neutral standard with multiple independent implementations, because that does not exist yet, and it is not for teams whose product is a plain chat transcript, where generative UI adds a rendering layer that earns nothing.
Pricing
- OpenUI framework (MIT, self-hosted)$0/mo
- Gateway Free$0/mo
- Gateway Build$59/mo
- Gateway Grow$599/mo
- Gateway ScaleContact sales
From the vendor pricing page, 2026-10-23















