Master Dify with our step-by-step tutorial, detailed feature walkthrough, and expert tips.
Explore the key features that make Dify powerful for ai agent workflows.
Drag-and-drop interface for connecting LLM calls, tools, conditional logic, and data transformations into production workflows. Supports chatflow and standard workflow modes.
A product team builds a customer support agent that routes queries to different knowledge bases based on topic classification, all without writing orchestration code
Built-in document ingestion, chunking, embedding, and retrieval. Upload PDFs, web pages, or text files and Dify handles the vector storage and retrieval automatically.
A legal team uploads 500 contract PDFs and builds a Q&A agent that answers questions about specific clauses with source citations
Agents can connect to external MCP servers for standardized tool access, enabling interoperability with the growing ecosystem of MCP-compatible tools and data sources.
Connecting a Dify agent to an MCP server that exposes your company's internal APIs, letting the agent query databases and trigger workflows through a standard protocol
Support for all major LLM providers with the ability to swap models per node. Run expensive models for complex reasoning and cheaper models for classification in the same workflow.
Using GPT-4o for initial query understanding, then routing to Claude for long-form generation and a local model for PII detection, all in one pipeline
Yes. The self-hosted Community Edition runs under Apache 2.0 with the full feature set and no usage limits. You pay only for your own infrastructure (server, database, LLM API keys). There's no separate license fee or hidden enterprise gate on core features.
Dify is a visual platform. LangChain and LlamaIndex are code-level frameworks. Dify is faster for prototyping and accessible to non-engineers, but the visual builder limits flexibility for complex custom logic. Teams that need full programmatic control over every step should use LangChain or LlamaIndex. Teams that want faster iteration and broader team access should consider Dify.
Dify supports OpenAI (GPT-4o, o1), Anthropic (Claude 3.5/4), Google (Gemini), Mistral, Cohere, and self-hosted models via Ollama or compatible APIs. You can use different models for different nodes in the same workflow and switch providers without rebuilding.
Yes, with caveats. The cloud Professional plan supports up to 5,000 messages/month, which is enough for internal tools but tight for customer-facing applications. Self-hosted has no limits beyond your infrastructure. For high-volume production use, self-hosted is the recommended path.
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Tutorial updated March 2026