What it is
Dify is an open-source LLM app development platform. Its interface combines AI workflows, RAG pipelines, agent capabilities, model management and observability features (including Opik, Langfuse and Arize Phoenix). It is meant to take you from prototype to production, and every offering comes with corresponding APIs.
Who it's for
- Developers building LLM-powered apps who want a visual workflow canvas
- Teams that need RAG pipelines over documents such as PDFs and PPTs
- Organizations that want to self-host, or need SSO, RBAC and enterprise support SLAs
- Developers who want to call LLM app functionality through APIs from their own business logic
Requirements
Requirements
- CPU >= 2 Core
- RAM >= 4 GiB
- Docker installed
- Docker Compose v2.24.0 or later
Setup
Start Dify with Docker Compose
From the cloned repository, go to the docker directory, copy the example env file, and start the services. The README gives these commands with
cd difyas the first step.bashcd dify cd docker cp .env.example .env docker compose up -dOpen the dashboard and initialize
After the containers are running, open http://localhost/install in your browser and start the initialization process.
Pros & cons
Pros
- Pro:Visual canvas for building and testing AI workflows
- Pro:Supports hundreds of proprietary and open-source LLMs from dozens of providers, including any OpenAI API-compatible models
- Pro:Built-in RAG pipeline covers document ingestion to retrieval, with text extraction from PDFs, PPTs and other common formats
- Pro:All offerings come with corresponding APIs (Backend-as-a-Service), plus LLMOps monitoring and log analysis
Cons
- Con:Licensed under the Dify Open Source License, which is based on Apache 2.0 with additional conditions rather than plain Apache 2.0
- Con:Self-hosting requires minimum 2 CPU cores, 4 GiB RAM, and Docker Compose v2.24.0 or later
- Con:SSO, RBAC security and enterprise support SLAs are available only through Dify Enterprise
Images
