Yes. Dify has a free plan or free tier. Paid plans add more usage and features.

How much does Dify cost?

Dify's paid plans: Sandbox (Cloud): Free; Professional (Cloud): $59/workspace/month or $590/year; Team (Cloud): $159/workspace/month or $1,590/year; Community (self-hosted): Free. Prices were taken from the official pricing page; check it for the current offer.

What is Dify best for?

People use Dify for building a customer support chatbot on company documents, automating multi-step processes with AI agents, prototyping LLM apps before production, running AI tooling on private infrastructure.

Which platforms does Dify support?

Dify is available on API, Self-hosted (Docker), Web.

What are some alternatives to Dify?

Similar tools include Riku, DumplingAI, Devs.ai, Airia. See the Alternatives section to compare them.

Dify

Dify lets developers and teams build AI agents, RAG knowledge bases and agentic workflows on a visual canvas, deployable as a hosted cloud service, self-hosted or in a private VPC.

What is Dify?

Dify is a platform for building AI applications, agents and agentic workflows on a visual canvas. It brings together a workflow designer, a knowledge pipeline for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), access to many language models and a marketplace of tools and plugins. Apps built in Dify can be published as web apps, embedded in a website or called through an API.

Dify can be used three ways: as a hosted cloud service, as a self-hosted Community Edition under a source-available license, or as an Enterprise deployment in your own VPC. That flexibility makes it popular with developers, product teams and larger organizations that need to keep data on their own infrastructure.

Key Features of Dify

Workflow Studio

A visual builder lets you define how an app retrieves data, calls models, uses tools, branches on decisions and asks a human for input. The logic stays visible, which makes testing and handoffs easier.

Agents with skills and tools

You can build an agent by chatting with Dify or configuring it manually, then use it as a standalone app, embed it on a site, or reuse it as a node inside a larger workflow.

Knowledge Pipeline

Dify prepares searchable knowledge bases from files, websites, online documents and drives, which agents and chat apps then use for grounded answers.

Multi-model support

Cloud plans include message credits for models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, xAI and Tongyi. When credits run out, you can plug in your own API keys.

Triggers and automation

Workflows can start automatically from plugins, schedules or webhooks, with trigger event allowances set by plan.

Flexible deployment

Choose the managed cloud, a single-command Docker install of the Community Edition, or Enterprise with SSO/SAML, role-based access, audit logs and Kubernetes Helm charts.

Dify Pricing

Dify Cloud is billed per workspace, and annual billing saves about 17%. Prices exclude applicable taxes. Self-hosting the Community Edition is free.

Prices checked on October 27, 2026; check the official pricing page for current plans.

Who Should Use Dify?

Developers prototyping and shipping chatbots, agents and RAG apps
Product teams that want non-engineers to see and adjust AI logic
Companies that must self-host AI tooling for privacy or compliance
Enterprises standardizing AI app building across business units
Educators and researchers experimenting with LLM workflows

Is Dify Worth It?

Dify is one of the more complete platforms for building AI apps visually. The combination of workflows, agents, knowledge bases and multi-model support covers most common LLM use cases, and the free self-hosted edition is a strong option for teams with technical staff. The cloud plans are straightforward and let small teams start without infrastructure work.

There are trade-offs. The free Sandbox is limited to 200 message credits and five apps, so it is mainly for evaluation. The Professional plan allows only three team members, and larger teams need Team or Enterprise. Self-hosting is free but requires you to manage updates, scaling and security, and the license is described as Apache-2.0-derivative rather than pure Apache, so commercial users should read it carefully. For teams serious about production AI apps, Dify is well worth a trial. Visit the official Dify website to get started.