Dify vs Flowise vs Langflow

Shared dimensions

Tool	Evaluation lane	Evidence status
Dify	AI application lifecycle and workflows	Partial; no catalog entry
Flowise	Visual LLM flows and agents	Partial; no catalog entry
Langflow	Visual component flows for AI applications	Partial; no catalog entry

No production, model, connector, or agent reliability parity is established. Evaluate exported artifacts and failure controls, not canvas appearance.

Operator profiles

Dify merits evaluation where an application-oriented control plane is desired; Flowise or Langflow merit developer-led prototyping where visual composition helps. All need an engineer and accountable workflow owner for production use.

Task coverage

They can prototype retrieval, classification, drafting, extraction, and human-reviewed routing. Coverage is partial; autonomous contract, payment, access, safety, employment, or member decisions are outside the recommended scope.

Human work remaining

People define ground truth, curate data, review prompts and outputs, approve consequential actions, manage exceptions, monitor cost and quality, and stop unsafe workflows.

Technical difficulty

Prototype difficulty is moderate; production difficulty is high due to models, evaluation, orchestration, state, queues, tools, secrets, observability, scaling, upgrades, and incident response.

True-cost categories

Count hosting, model/API and embedding usage, databases/vector stores, connectors, evaluation data, development, monitoring, security review, human review, support, backups, and incident response. Exact prices and free limits are not established.

Portability

Export flow definitions, prompts, code/components, schemas, model parameters, test sets, evaluations, secrets references, and dependency versions. Visual graphs are not portable if proprietary nodes or hosted state cannot be reproduced.

Integrations and verification caveat

Model, vector store, API, tool, identity, and data connectors are partial until versions, authentication, schemas, limits, retries, permission propagation, deletion, and current official docs are verified.

Security

Treat tool-enabled flows as privileged applications. Isolate secrets, allowlist tools, constrain network egress, validate inputs/outputs, defend against prompt injection, minimize retained content, log safely, and require approval before side effects.

Licensing

Verify each project’s current repository license, additional conditions, enterprise boundaries, plugins, model licenses, and hosted-service terms. Do not infer OSI status from source availability.

Maintenance

Maintain dependency and model versions, prompts, connectors, evaluations, credentials, indexes, usage limits, failed-run queues, upgrades, backups, and a manual fallback.

Scenario recommendations

Pilot a read-only classifier or draft generator with a test set, explicit abstention, malicious inputs, provider outage, budget limit, human approval, and reproducible export.

Do not use when

Do not begin with autonomous agents, unbounded tools, sensitive production data, or a process with no ground truth and no human exception owner. A visual builder does not reduce accountability.

Verification

Verified on 2026-07-18. Licenses, model and connector support, prices, free limits, and integration behavior are partial or not established.