Dify
4.5
Dify is a development platform for LLM applications: you assemble prompts, retrieval, tools and agent logic in a GUI, then publish the result as a web app or an API. The open-source edition can be self-hosted, which puts it in the same decision as n8n — the team that cannot send documents to a hosted vendor can still ship a RAG application.
- Commercial use OK
- Free tier
- Enterprise contract
- Pricing
- Free
- Free tier
- Free tier
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Japanese UI
- Not confirmed
- Enterprise contract
- Available
What it is good for
- Standing up an internal RAG assistant over company documents
- Prototyping an LLM feature before committing to application code
- Teams that need the whole pipeline to run on their own infrastructure
- Giving non-engineers a safe surface to iterate on prompts
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Open-source edition is self-hostable and free to run
- RAG pipeline, prompt management and agent logic in one GUI
- Publishes as a web app or an API, so the prototype is also the product
- Model-agnostic: swap providers without rebuilding the app
Trade-offs
- Self-hosting brings the usual operational burden
- Heavily customised applications eventually outgrow the GUI
- Smaller community than the major application frameworks
Editors' review
Ship a RAG application without writing the plumbing — or sending the documents anywhere
Dify covers the unglamorous middle of an LLM application: chunking and indexing documents, managing prompts, wiring tools, exposing the result over an API. Doing that in a GUI compresses the distance between an idea and something colleagues can click, which is where most internal AI projects stall.
The self-hosting option is the differentiator. Internal knowledge is exactly the material that cannot be uploaded to a third-party service at many companies, and running the open-source edition keeps the documents, the index and the logs inside your own boundary.
It is a starting point rather than a destination. Once an application needs bespoke retrieval logic or unusual evaluation, teams tend to move to framework code. Treat Dify as the fastest way to find out whether the application is worth building at all.
Verdict
The quickest route to a working internal RAG assistant, especially where data residency rules out hosted tools.
Compiled from official documentation and public sources, with our own editorial judgement. We do not publish figures we cannot source.