What is Dify?
By Riley Park · Last verified: October 2026
Dify is a platform for building AI agents, agentic workflows, and RAG (retrieval) pipelines in a visual workspace, made by LangGenius, Inc. You can use the hosted Dify Cloud, or run the free Community Edition on your own servers under Dify's own license based on Apache 2.0. Dify Cloud runs from a free Sandbox to the Team plan at $1,590 a year. Verified on dify.ai, October 8, 2026.
What does Dify do? You build an AI app on a visual canvas: an agent that chooses its own steps, a workflow with fixed steps, or an assistant that answers from your own documents through a RAG pipeline (a knowledge base it searches before answering). Dify works with a wide range of AI models and tools, in one workspace your team shares, and it is meant to take a project from prototype to production without a rebuild.
Is Dify AI the same as Dify? Yes. The product is Dify, at dify.ai; "Dify AI" is how many people search for it.
Is Dify open source? Its source code is public on GitHub, where the project has more than 158,000 stars, under Dify's own license: Apache 2.0 plus two conditions. You may not use it to run a multi-tenant service without Dify's written permission, and you may not remove Dify's logo or copyright notices from the console. Dify's site calls this source-available. For a team running its own agents, neither condition usually matters.
How much does Dify cost? The self-hosted Community Edition is free. On Dify Cloud, the Sandbox is free (200 message credits), Professional is $590 a year (5,000 message credits a month, 3 members), Team is $1,590 a year (10,000 message credits a month, 50 members), and Enterprise is custom. See Is Dify free? for what each free option covers.
Who makes Dify, and is it a Chinese company? LangGenius, Inc., founded in March 2023 by CEO Luyu Zhang. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with offices in the Bay Area, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Suzhou. It raised a $30 million Series Pre-A at a $180 million valuation in March 2026, per Dify's own announcement.
How does DDR rate Dify? DDR Score 8.35, in the top score cluster of the six AI agent builders DDR scores and listed as a Strong Performer while its user review data is limited, led by its self-hosting option. Read the full Dify review, or see how it compares in Dify vs Botpress vs MindStudio and across all six no-code AI agent builders DDR scores.