One model change forces backend edits in every small tool, a common team bottleneck. Dify is an open-source AI app orchestration platform; the community edition deploys on your own server and centralizes model access, prompt orchestration, knowledge retrieval and workflows in one admin, with finished apps exposed as APIs for a frontend. You provide the deployment environment and model services. Capabilities change quickly by version, so check the project repository.
What it does
- Open source and self-hosted, with settings and data kept in your environment
- Visual app orchestration manages prompts, variables and flow nodes
- Built-in knowledge retrieval brings documents into answers
- Several model services can be plugged in without changing app code
- Apps expose APIs suited to separated front and back ends
Who it is for
- Several internal tools should share one orchestration and knowledge base
- It must run on your servers with data staying inside the network
- Models are still being compared and switched often
- A prototype works and needs a stable API for the frontend
How to get started
- Follow the repository deployment notes to start an instance on a test machine
- Build a knowledge base from a real document and check retrieval recall
- Turn the most common scenario into a minimal app, then add nodes
