Dify AI

Free

By AI Bookmarks Editorial Team, Directory editors Last reviewed 2026-10-23

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Platform for LLM applications with visual workflows, retrieval over your own documents and self-hosting.

Quick facts

Pricing	Free
Free tier	Yes — free cloud plan, plus a free self-hosted edition
Platforms	Web, self-hosted, API
Developer	Dify
Website	https://dify.ai/

What Dify AI is

Dify is a platform for building LLM applications. It combines a visual workflow editor, a prompt IDE, retrieval-augmented generation over your own documents, and model routing across providers, so an application can be assembled rather than coded from scratch. Workflows are graphs: nodes for retrieval, branching, code, HTTP calls and model steps, with logs for each run. Agents can call tools, and a knowledge pipeline handles ingestion, chunking and embedding. It can be used as a hosted service or self-hosted, which matters for teams with data-residency requirements. The limits are that visual graphs get unwieldy for complex logic, self-hosting needs operational care, and quality depends heavily on how retrieval is configured — chunk size and embedding choice matter more than the model. Prompt versions can be compared side by side with logged runs, which makes it easier to see whether a change improved answers or only changed them. An API endpoint is generated for each app, so a workflow can be called from another service.

Best for

Internal assistants that answer from company documents
Teams that must self-host to keep data in-house
Comparing several models behind one workflow

Not ideal for

Applications with complex application state and custom UI logic
Teams without anyone to operate a self-hosted service

Pros

Visual workflows cover retrieval, branching and API calls
Self-hosting keeps data inside your own infrastructure
Model routing lets you swap providers per step

Cons

Graphs become hard to read as logic grows
Self-hosting requires operational work
Retrieval quality depends on tuning chunking and embeddings

Pricing in detail

The cloud version has a free plan with limited usage and paid tiers billed monthly that raise message quotas, knowledge-base storage and seats. The community edition is free to self-host, with the cost moving to your own infrastructure and maintenance. Enterprise self-hosting is licensed separately. Because the self-hosted edition is free, the real comparison is hosting and staff time against the cloud subscription.