Buying snapshot
Scroll sideways to see all columns. With a keyboard, focus this table and use the arrow keys.
| Decision point | What Dify states |
|---|---|
Deployment | Dify Cloud, hosted by Dify; Dify Enterprise, self-hosted or in your VPC; Community Edition, self-hosted with Docker. |
License | The Dify Open Source License, based on Apache 2.0 with additional conditions. Dify's site calls the Community Edition source-available. |
Self-hosting requirements | At least 2 CPU cores and 4 GiB RAM, plus Docker Compose v2.24.0 or later. Dify Enterprise lists a Helm chart for Kubernetes. |
Team features on Cloud | Dify Cloud says shared workspaces, team roles and activity logs come out of the box. How many members can join depends on the plan. |
Enterprise controls | SSO/SAML, RBAC and audit logs, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and a dedicated CSM with 24/7 support. |
Our take
Choose Dify when people outside engineering should build LLM workflows, knowledge-base apps and agents on a visual canvas, with code nodes for the parts that need a developer. Dify Cloud lets you test that fit without managing infrastructure, and its Sandbox plan is free.
Evaluate Dify
Comparisons
Where it stands out
Logic you can see and hand off. Visual blocks define how an app retrieves data, makes decisions, uses tools and asks for human input, and the logic stays visible for testing and debugging. Builders can start from a template, add forms and variables, or drop into a code node.
Open model choice. Dify connects to hundreds of proprietary and open-source LLMs from dozens of providers and self-hosted setups, including any OpenAI API-compatible model, and Dify Cloud lets you swap providers at any time.
Knowledge preparation built in. Knowledge Pipeline builds repeatable pipelines from files, websites, online documents and drives that extract, clean, chunk and index content, and you can test retrieval before connecting it to agents or workflows.
Agents that can act. Agents get their own sandbox to run commands, install software and handle files, and can use skills, MCP servers, your own APIs or Marketplace tools (Dify lists Slack, Perplexity, ComfyUI, Firecrawl and 200+ more), as a chat app or as a workflow step.
One build, several outlets. The same app can ship as a hosted web app, website embed, API endpoint or MCP-compatible tool. Logs, feedback, annotations, latency and usage data show what ran, and Dify lists Opik, Langfuse and Arize Phoenix among its observability features.
Product screenshot
Trade-offs to weigh
Check the license before commercial self-hosting. Dify aims the free Community Edition at open-source enthusiasts, individual developers and non-commercial projects, and its license adds conditions to Apache 2.0. Read those conditions before a business deploys Community.
Community deployments are yours to maintain. Help for the Community Edition comes from the community Discord and forum. Plan who will upgrade and support a self-hosted install.
Pricing and plan conditions
Dify Cloud is priced per workspace per year, and each plan includes one team workspace. Dify says annual billing saves 17%, and prices exclude applicable taxes, which may be added at checkout. Message credits let you try models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI and Tongyi and are consumed by model type; once they run out you can switch to your own API key, which moves ongoing model costs to your provider account. Documents indexed in High Quality mode use knowledge storage, and new documents stop uploading at the limit.
Scroll sideways to see all columns. With a keyboard, focus this table and use the arrow keys.
| Dify Cloud | Sandbox | Professional | Team |
|---|---|---|---|
Price | Free | $590 per workspace / year | $1590 per workspace / year |
Message credits | 200 | 5,000 / month | 10,000 / month |
Team members | 1 | 3 | 50 |
Apps | 5 | 50 | 200 |
Knowledge documents | 50 | 500 | 1,000 |
Knowledge data storage | 50MB | 5GB | 20GB |
Knowledge requests | 10 / min | 100 / min | 1,000 / min |
Document processing | Standard | Priority | Top Priority |
Trigger events | 3,000 | 20,000 / month | Unlimited |
Triggers per workflow | Up to 2 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Workflow execution | Standard | Faster | Priority |
Annotation quota (chat apps) | 10 | 2,000 | 5,000 |
Log history | 30 days | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Dify API rate limit | 5,000 / month | No Dify API rate limit | No Dify API rate limit |
Scroll sideways to see all columns. With a keyboard, focus this table and use the arrow keys.
| Self-hosted edition | Price | What Dify lists |
|---|---|---|
Community | Free | All core features released under the public repository, a single workspace, and use under the Dify Open Source License. |
Enterprise | Custom. Contact Sales. | Only Enterprise includes enterprise-grade scalable deployment, commercial license authorization, exclusive enterprise features, multiple workspaces and enterprise management, SSO, negotiated SLAs by Dify partners, advanced security and controls, official updates and maintenance by Dify, and professional technical support. |
Public signals
About these signals
Verified factual signals from public sources. They indicate observable activity or interest, not total adoption, product quality, or cost.
2.4k GitHub commits 90d159.6k GitHub stars1 vulnerability across 1 package
See all signals from 8 sources
PyPI · dify-client@0.1.10
Alternatives to Dify
The reviewed substitutes for Dify among the visual agent builders, and what would make each one the better answer.
Other approaches
A different approach to the same problem. Each substitutes only for the workload named beside it.
- Haystack
- Choose Haystack over Dify when you need battle-tested retrieval-augmented generation with full control over every pipeline stage and zero vendor lock-in.
- LlamaIndex
- Cross-class on purpose: Dify is a low-code agent builder and LlamaIndex a code-first framework, so they are not the same product, and the substitution is real anyway for one workload. Dify ships RAG -- knowledge base, configurable chunking, hybrid search -- behind a visual canvas, which removes the reason to write ingestion and index code at all when engineering time rather than retrieval depth is the constraint. Conditional and one-directional in emphasis: LlamaIndex's indexing strategies and connector ecosystem have no Dify equivalent, and Dify's non-engineer authoring has no LlamaIndex equivalent.Applies to: Standing up a RAG chatbot over company documents. Dify stands in for LlamaIndex when the team wants it built and maintained without framework code; LlamaIndex stands in when the corpus or the retrieval strategy is the hard part.
- OpenAI Agents SDK
- The same cross-class trade one layer over: Dify's visual canvas with branching, loops and a built-in knowledge base delivers the agent-and-RAG application without SDK code, which is the whole of what a team reaches the OpenAI Agents SDK for on a straightforward build. Conditional: the SDK gives handoffs, tracing and programmatic control Dify does not expose, and Dify gives an authoring surface a non-engineer can use.Applies to: Delivering an internal agent or RAG chatbot quickly. Dify stands in for the OpenAI Agents SDK when engineering time is the constraint and the flow fits a canvas; the SDK stands in when the agent needs handoffs, tracing or logic beyond what the builder exposes.