Dify
Dify is an open-source visual builder for agentic workflows and RAG pipelines, deployable on cloud, VPC, or self-hosted Docker.
Dify is the visual agent builder we'd shortlist when security review is part of the buying process — Enterprise answers SSO, RBAC and audit requirements, and Community Edition gives you a Docker escape hatch under a source-available license. Cloud pricing is per workspace, billed annually: $590/year for Professional and $1,590/year for Team. The honest caveats: message credits are a taster, not a budget (you'll move to your own API keys), and deeply custom control flow still pushes you outside
Verified 5h ago · liveness 81/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/dify
- Product and platform teams shipping RAG support or knowledge assistants
- Teams that need self-hosted or VPC deployment with SSO, RBAC and audit logs
- Developers who want a visual workflow builder with plugin and MCP extensibility
- Regulated industries needing audit logs plus SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 evidence
- Teams needing deeply custom agentic control flow that resists a visual canvas
- Anyone wanting a native mobile app SDK — output is web app, API, embed or MCP tool
- Solo tinkerers who want a permanently free production workspace beyond 200 credits
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Skip Dify if your agent logic needs deeply custom control flow the visual canvas can't express, or if you need a native mobile app SDK — Dify ships web app, API, embed, and MCP tool outputs instead.
Message credits are consumed based on model type, and after the Professional plan's 5,000/month runs out you must supply your own API key and pay the model provider directly.
Dify Cloud is priced per workspace, not per seat, which favors small teams: Professional is $590/workspace/year (billed annually, 3 members, 50 apps) and Team is $1,590/workspace/year (billed annually, 50 members, 200 apps), against a free Sandbox capped at 200 message credits. Only Dify Enterprise, which is quote-based with SSO/SAML, audit logs, and a dedicated CSM, sits in the same price band as vendors like Retool or Palantir-adjacent enterprise builds; for a 10-person team Dify Team is
In short
Dify — Dify is an open-source visual builder for agentic workflows and RAG pipelines, deployable on cloud, VPC, or self-hosted Docker. Best for Product and platform teams shipping RAG support or knowledge assistants, Teams that need self-hosted or VPC deployment with SSO, RBAC and audit logs, Developers who want a visual workflow builder with plugin and MCP extensibility. Free to start; paid plans from $590/yr.
What's new in Dify
Checked 2 days agoAcross the latest 4 updates: 2 feature updates, 1 changelog entry and 1 news mention.
How to Create an AI Shopping Agent that Boosts Your Ecommerce Store
A Dify guide covering catalog scraping, personalized recommendations, and lead capture for building an ecommerce shopping agent inside the platform.
Dify x Sonilo: Give Your Video Workflows a Licensed Soundtrack
A Sonilo integration added to Dify generates licensed music and sound effects matched to each cut, so video workflows can score output without leaving the platform.
From Discovery to Response: A More Connected Dify Marketplace
Marketplace update adding new ways to find, build with, and share tools and integrations across Dify workspaces.
Introducing New Agent
A new Dify Agent built by chatting — it generates reusable skills, preserves conversation context, and slots into larger workflows as an agent node.
What people actually say about Dify — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
62 mentions across 5 sources (Hacker News, YouTube, Stack Overflow, GitHub, Lemmy) · researched Aug 15, 2026.
Average across the 5 sources that answered — each source counts once, not each post.
- +Visual drag-and-drop builder speeds up AI workflow creation
- +Multi-LLM support covers major providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek
- +Built-in RAG pipeline simplifies knowledge ingestion and retrieval
- +Human-in-the-loop nodes allow manual review and control
- +Large plugin ecosystem and MCP integration extend capabilities
- −Upgrade bugs have broken existing knowledge bases (e.g., 1.9.1→1.9.2)
- −Supply chain incident (React2Shell) raises security concerns
- −Complex workflow design can have a steep learning curve
- −Confusion with n8n for automation use cases
- −Knowledge base answer reliability is questioned by users
- • Self-hosting requires infrastructure and maintenance effort
- • Additional costs for LLM API usage and vector DB hosting
- • Some advanced features may require Enterprise edition
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Dify? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Visual drag-and-drop Workflow Studio with a visible node-and-branch execution path
- Agent builder that creates agents by chat, generates reusable skills and keeps conversation context
- Knowledge Pipeline for ingesting files, websites, online documents and drives
- Extract, clean, chunk, index and test retrieval before connecting a knowledge base
- Multi-LLM support for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI and Tongyi, or bring your own API key
- Marketplace for model providers, tools, data sources and MCP integrations
- Publish apps as hosted web apps, API endpoints, embeds or MCP-compatible tools
- Human-in-the-loop input nodes inside workflow logic
- Observability with logs, feedback, annotations, latency and usage data
- Webhook, plugin and schedule triggers to auto-start workflows
- Self-host Community Edition with a single Docker command (158K+ GitHub stars)
- Helm chart for Kubernetes deployments on Dify Enterprise
- Sonilo integration generating licensed music and sound effects for video workflows
- Message credits for trying models, switchable to your own API key when used up
- SSO/SAML, RBAC and audit logs on Dify Enterprise
About Dify
Dify gives teams one workspace to assemble AI apps from visible building blocks instead of a blank repo. The Workflow Studio turns prompt logic into an execution path of nodes, branches, tool calls, retrieval steps, and human-input pauses, so the reasoning stays inspectable and handoff-ready. The Agent builder creates agents by chatting or manual configuration, generating reusable skills that run as standalone apps, website embeds, or agent nodes inside a larger workflow. The Knowledge Pipeline handles files, websites, online documents, and drives, with extraction, cleaning, chunking, indexing and retrieval testing before a knowledge base goes live. Model coverage spans OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI and Tongyi, extendable through the Marketplace, where teams install model providers, tools, data sources, MCP integrations, or define their own and reuse approved plugins across projects. Publishing targets are practical: hosted web app, API endpoint, embed, or MCP-compatible tool, with logs, feedback, annotations, latency and usage data feeding back into improvement. Deployment is the differentiator buyers actually argue about. Dify Cloud is the hosted route with zero infrastructure. Dify Enterprise self-hosts or runs in your VPC with SSO/SAML, RBAC, audit logs, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, Helm charts for Kubernetes, and a dedicated CSM with 24/7 support. Community Edition is source-available under an Apache-2.0-derivative license, self-hosted with a single Docker command at 158K+ GitHub stars. Reference logos include Maersk, Adobe, Volvo, PayPal, Panasonic, Novartis, KPMG and Mercedes-Benz. Positioning-wise, Dify sits between code-first orchestration frameworks and lighter drag-and-drop chatbot tools. You get visual workflows business teams can read, plus plugin extensibility engineers can extend, without giving up control over where the data lives.
Behind the Verdict
Where Dify earns its keep is the middle ground. Prototype in the Sandbox, then keep the same workflow, knowledge base and agent definitions when you move to a hosted workspace or your own VPC deployment. You're not rebuilding the stack when the pilot becomes a production service, and that continuity is the reason teams choose it over stitching LangChain code together for every project. The licensing and deployment story is the real deciding factor. Source-available Community Edition runs with a single Docker command, Enterprise adds SSO/SAML, RBAC, audit logs, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 evidence, and Cloud skips infrastructure work entirely. If your security reviewers need to see the deployment target before they sign off, that trio is usually enough to get through. On cost, know what you're buying. Professional at $590 per workspace per year covers 3 team members, 50 apps and 5,000 message credits a month; Team at $1,590 raises that to 50 members, 200 apps and 10,000 credits. Credits are for trying different models — once they're spent you plug in your own API keys. Budget for those keys from day one rather than treating credits as headroom, and compare the two tiers on members, apps and knowledge storage, not on the credit line. Recent releases keep filling gaps that mattered: agent creation by chat that generates reusable skills and preserves conversation context, Sonilo-licensed music and sound effects for video workflows, and a Marketplace that's better at discovery. If your roadmap includes multimedia output or sharing tooling across teams, those land in your favor. Picking Dify when you need that matters more than the marketing. Where it bites is control flow. Heavily conditional, stateful agent behavior that resists a visual canvas will send you into
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Dify actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Ingests internal Confluence exports and product docs through the Knowledge Pipeline, tests retrieval quality before connecting anything, then wires the knowledge base into a support chat agent and publishes it as an embed on the help center.
Outcome: A support assistant answering from current documentation, with logs, latency, and usage data attached so the team can see what it got wrong before customers complain.
Builds a workflow that classifies inbound emails by intent, routes freight inquiries to the right queue, and pauses on a human-in-the-loop input node whenever confidence is low.
Outcome: Routing volume grows without adding headcount, and the low-confidence path keeps a person in the loop instead of silently misrouting freight.
Deploys Community Edition with a single Docker command for a pilot, then moves the production app to Dify Enterprise with SSO/SAML, RBAC, and audit logs so security sign-off isn't a blocker.
Outcome: Pilot-to-production without rebuilding the stack, and an audit trail security reviewers accept.
Use Cases
- Build a customer-facing chat assistant with RAG over company documents without writing application code.
- Let business users self-serve internal AI tools through a governed drag-and-drop interface.
- Prototype and deploy several AI features in a week using the template library and Creator Center.
- Automate email routing by classifying and assigning support messages through workflow intent routing.
- Build an ecommerce shopping agent that scrapes a catalog, personalizes recommendations, and captures leads.
- Generate licensed music and sound effects matched to each cut inside a video workflow.
- Create a multi-stage content pipeline that drafts, reviews, and schedules social posts.
- Run an agent that adapts existing SaaS tools like Calendly without rebuilding them.
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-10-16
Limitations
- Dify offers both a hosted Dify Cloud and self-hosted options: Community Edition is open-source and self-deployed with Docker, while Dify Enterprise provides private deployment.
- Dify Cloud's Professional plan is $590 per workspace per year and includes 5,000 message credits/month (consumed based on model type, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI, Tongyi), 1 team workspace, 3 team members, 50 apps, 500 knowledge documents, and 5GB knowledge data storage; once credits run out you must switch to your own API key.
- High Quality indexing mode consumes Knowledge Data Storage, and when that storage reaches its limit new documents cannot be uploaded.
as of 2026-10-01
Verification history
We have re-verified Dify 21 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-checked, vendor evidence unchanged
- — re-checked, vendor evidence unchanged
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 21 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Dify tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Sandbox
$0
Ideal for
Evaluating Dify's core features or building a throwaway prototype before committing budget.
What this tier adds
Free entry point: 200 message credits, 1 member, 5 apps, 50 knowledge documents, 50MB knowledge storage.
Professional
$590 per workspace / year
Ideal for
Independent developers and small teams of up to 3 people shipping a production AI app on Dify Cloud, billed annually.
What this tier adds
Adds 5,000 message credits/month, 50 apps, 500 knowledge documents, 5GB storage, 100 knowledge requests/min, and priority document processing.
Team
$1590 per workspace / year
Ideal for
Medium-sized teams of up to 50 collaborators needing more throughput and higher knowledge limits, billed annually.
What this tier adds
Raises limits to 10,000 message credits/month, 200 apps, 1,000 knowledge documents, 20GB storage, 1,000 knowledge requests/min, top-priority processing, and unlimited trigger events.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Dify's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Dify Cloud is priced per workspace, not per seat, which favors small teams: Professional is $590/workspace/year (billed annually, 3 members, 50 apps) and Team is $1,590/workspace/year (billed annually, 50 members, 200 apps), against a free Sandbox capped at 200 message credits. Only Dify Enterprise, which is quote-based with SSO/SAML, audit logs, and a dedicated CSM, sits in the same price band as vendors like Retool or Palantir-adjacent enterprise builds; for a 10-person team Dify Team is
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Dify — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Dify Cloud: sign up and have a chat app running in well under an hour; a RAG assistant with tested retrieval is a day's work. Self-hosted Community Edition: one Docker command gets the stack up, budget a couple of hours for config and model keys. Dify Enterprise: expect a procurement and deployment cycle measured in weeks, since SSO, RBAC, and VPC networking are part of the rollout, not an
Switching to or from Dify
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From LangChain or LlamaIndex: rebuild the pipeline as workflow nodes, then keep the code you actually needed as a plugin or tool call.
- →From a no-code chatbot builder: export your question-answer pairs into the Knowledge Pipeline and re-create the conversation flow in Workflow Studio.
- →From a spreadsheet-backed internal tool: upload the source files as knowledge documents and replace manual lookups with a retrieval node.
- →From a hosted assistant with no deployment controls: move the app to Dify Enterprise for SSO/SAML, RBAC, and audit logs.
- ↗To a code-first framework like LangChain: export prompts and retrieval configuration and reimplement the orchestration in code.
- ↗To a self-managed stack: run Community Edition under Docker or Helm and keep the same workflow definitions inside your own infrastructure.
- ↗To another agent platform: publish through Dify's API or MCP-compatible interface so existing callers keep working while you swap the backend.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
- Resourcedify.ai
Dify Blog
Unlock Agentic AI with Dify. Develop, deploy, and manage autonomous agents, RAG pipelines, and more for teams at any scale, effortlessly.
- Resourcedify.ai
Prompt Engineering for Workflow-Ready LLM Apps
Unlock Agentic AI with Dify. Develop, deploy, and manage autonomous agents, RAG pipelines, and more for teams at any scale, effortlessly.
- Resourcedify.ai
Designing Intent-Based Email Routing with Dify Workflow
Unlock Agentic AI with Dify. Develop, deploy, and manage autonomous agents, RAG pipelines, and more for teams at any scale, effortlessly.
- Resourcedify.ai
Finance Automation in Action: How to Solve the "Credit First" Management Challenge with Dify Workflow
Unlock Agentic AI with Dify. Develop, deploy, and manage autonomous agents, RAG pipelines, and more for teams at any scale, effortlessly.
- Resourcedify.ai
Deploying Private AI Agents with Dify on NVIDIA DGX Spark
Unlock Agentic AI with Dify. Develop, deploy, and manage autonomous agents, RAG pipelines, and more for teams at any scale, effortlessly.
- Resourcedify.ai
Agentic RAG: Smarter Retrieval with Autonomous Reasoning
Unlock Agentic AI with Dify. Develop, deploy, and manage autonomous agents, RAG pipelines, and more for teams at any scale, effortlessly.
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Dify”, and we withheld 5: 5 could not be judged, because “Dify” is a single word that other videos use for other things. Showing the 1 we can prove is about Dify.
Official links
Tools that pair well with Dify
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Dify, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Langflow
Visual low-code canvas for building AI agents, RAG pipelines, and MCP servers, deployable as an API or self-hosted.
Ruoyi Ai
Open-source, self-hosted AI assistant and agent framework with unified model routing, a full RAG chain, and local/remote MCP tooling.
AutoGen Studio
Free, open-source web UI for prototyping multi-agent AI workflows on AutoGen AgentChat — build agent teams without writing code.
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Alternatives to Dify
View all
Langflow
Visual low-code canvas for building AI agents, RAG pipelines, and MCP servers, deployable as an API or self-hosted.
Ruoyi Ai
Open-source, self-hosted AI assistant and agent framework with unified model routing, a full RAG chain, and local/remote MCP tooling.
AutoGen Studio
Free, open-source web UI for prototyping multi-agent AI workflows on AutoGen AgentChat — build agent teams without writing code.
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