Dify vs Flowise
Side-by-side comparison of two agent options that often come up together when people are choosing between self-hosted frameworks, managed assistants, and extensible AI tooling.
Open source139k stars
Dify
Production-ready platform for building and deploying agentic workflows with a visual interface
Open source52k stars
Flowise
Visual drag-and-drop builder for AI agents and LLM workflows — no code required
Category
Dify
Flowise
Tagline
Production-ready platform for building and deploying agentic workflows with a visual interface
Visual drag-and-drop builder for AI agents and LLM workflows — no code required
Deployment
Self-hosted / Managed cloud (Dify Cloud)
Self-hosted / Flowise Cloud
Pricing
Open source and self-hostable for free. Dify Cloud starts at $59/month for teams.
Open source and free to self-host. Flowise Cloud starts at $35/month.
Channels
Web, api, Slack, Teams
Web, api, Slack, Teams
Open source
Yes
Yes
Privacy
Self-hosted deployment keeps data on your infrastructure. Dify Cloud sends data to Dify servers.
Self-hosted deployment keeps data on your infrastructure.
Dify pros
- Visual workflow builder lowers the barrier to building agentic apps.
- Production-ready with observability, versioning, and team collaboration.
- Supports RAG pipelines, tool calling, and multi-agent orchestration.
Flowise pros
- Visual builder — no code required.
- Largest ecosystem of integrations of any open-source agent builder.
- 51K+ GitHub stars, active community.
Dify cons
- Heavier infrastructure than lightweight agent frameworks.
- Best suited for app builders, not researchers or coding agents.
- Managed cloud tier can get expensive at scale.
Flowise cons
- Visual workflows hard to debug at scale.
- Less flexible than code-first frameworks.
- Self-hosting requires some DevOps knowledge.
Dify gotchas
- Designed for building agent-powered apps, not for personal AI assistant use cases.
- Self-hosting requires Docker and some ops knowledge.
Flowise gotchas
- Complex flows can hit LLM rate limits silently.
- Docker deployment recommended over npm for stability.
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