WebUI is a lightweight, portable C library that turns any web browser or WebView into the graphical interface of a native application, letting the backend be written in a preferred language while the frontend uses modern web technologies.

What it is

WebUI is a library, distributed under the MIT licence and hosted at webui.me, that lets a program render its user interface in a real web browser instead of a traditional GUI toolkit. The backend keeps control of the application logic and communicates with an HTML, JavaScript and TypeScript frontend, so teams can build a modern, professional-looking interface with the web tooling they already know. It is written in C and lives in the browsers and extensions-adjacent space of productivity and utility tooling, with topics covering browser, cpp, gui, javascript, typescript, web, webapp and webui.

The concrete problem it solves is the cost of embedding a WebView. A conventional WebView-based application needs a large SDK to build and many dependencies to run, and it can only reproduce some of the features of a real browser. WebUI inverts that: instead of embedding a WebView controller inside the program and growing the binary, it uses the browser already installed on the machine, keeping the library at a few kilobytes with a small memory footprint. The README frames it as a WebView controller that is not embedded in the program. Where an older legacy GUI library is complex and outdated, or a WebView build is too heavy to ship, WebUI offers the middle path.

Key capabilities

• Ships as a single header file, which keeps integration into an existing C or C++ codebase minimal.
• Runs portably with only a web browser present at runtime; a WebView is optional rather than required.
• Uses a fast binary WebSocket communication protocol between the backend and the frontend.
• Supports a cross-platform WebView as an optional rendering target when a browser should not be used.
• Uses a private browser profile for safety, so the host application does not touch the user's normal browsing session.
• Is multi-platform and multi-browser, with the supported browsers documented in the README.
• Publishes two download channels, the Latest Stable Release and the Nightly Build, alongside online documentation at webui.me/docs.html.

Who uses it and how

• Developers writing desktop tools in C or C++ who want an HTML frontend without adopting a legacy GUI library or bundling a full WebView runtime.
• Frontend engineers working in JavaScript and TypeScript on an interface that a compiled backend drives over the binary WebSocket channel.
• Projects that must stay small and portable, taking the browser-only path so the shipped binary stays in the kilobyte range.
• Applications that need an embedded rendering surface, which take the optional cross-platform WebView instead of relying on an installed browser.
• Teams evaluating the layout and window behaviour through the frameless examples under examples/C/frameless, including webui_frameless.png and webui_frameless_linux.png, and getting help from the WebUI GPT - C/C++ assistant.

Getting started

Download the Latest Stable Release from the GitHub releases page, or the Nightly Build tag, and follow the online documentation at webui.me/docs.html. The current line is v2.5.0-beta.4.

How it compares

Among the alternatives the project itself names, WebUI sits between legacy GUI libraries, which it describes as complex and outdated, and embedded WebView controllers, which need a large SDK to build and many dependencies to run. WebUI keeps the browser as the renderer and the library as a single header, so the program stays portable instead of carrying the WebView runtime.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster does not operate a database, storage or SMTP service, because WebUI is a library rather than a server product; the real requirement is a build toolchain and, in browser mode, a web browser on the target machine. Choose the optional WebView path only if the extra SDK and dependencies are acceptable, since that is the trade-off WebUI was designed to avoid. Be aware that the current published line is a beta, the README excerpt stays high-level about per-platform build steps, and detailed platform guidance lives in the external documentation.

# GCC
mingw32-make WEBUI_USE_TLS=1 WEBUI_TLS_INCLUDE="C:\curl-xxx-xxx-mingw\curl-xxx-xxx-mingw\include" WEBUI_TLS_LIB="C:\curl-xxx-xxx-mingw\curl-xxx-xxx-mingw\lib"

# MSVC
nmake WEBUI_USE_TLS=1 WEBUI_TLS_INCLUDE="C:\Program Files\OpenSSL-xxx\include" WEBUI_TLS_LIB="C:\Program Files\OpenSSL-xxx\lib"

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libssl-dev

# GCC
make WEBUI_USE_TLS=1

# Clang
make WEBUI_USE_TLS=1 CC=clang

brew install openssl
make WEBUI_USE_TLS=1