low-code on tomrochette.com

Dify

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dify is LangGenius’s open-source platform for building agentic workflows and RAG pipelines on a visual collaborative workspace, deployable on cloud, VPC, or self-hosted, and at 157,458 stars it is the largest repository in this category (GitHub API, as of 2026-09-29).

Scale is Dify’s moat: it is the surviving giant of the visual LLM-workflow genre, the same genre whose weakest incumbent, Flowise, just archived itself.

What it is
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A visual workflow studio plus knowledge pipeline, agent strategies, and a marketplace of tools and models, shipped as a TypeScript and Python application. Deployment is a choice of Dify Cloud (hosted SaaS), Enterprise (private deployment), or Community Edition (self-hosted with Docker). The license is a modified Apache 2.0: commercial use is allowed, but multi-tenant SaaS and some other conditions require a commercial license from LangGenius, which is why GitHub reports NOASSERTION. The repo sits at 157,458 stars with 24,813 forks, created 2023-04-12 (GitHub API, as of 2026-09-29).

Status
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Active: last push 2026-09-29, latest release 1.17.1 on 2026-09-10 (GitHub API, as of 2026-09-29). Its 2024 HN launch drew 185 points, and the community has kept growing since. The category context is the risk: Flowise’s shutdown discussion argued that capable coding agents are eroding the rigid low-code workflow approach, and that argument applies to every member of the genre, Dify included.

Strengths
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The community is the deepest in the genre: 157k stars and 24.8k forks give it a durability none of its visual-workflow rivals can match.
Breadth under one roof: agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, knowledge bases, a marketplace, and enterprise deployment options.
Self-hosting with Docker is first-class, and the cloud tier exists for teams that do not want to operate it.
Multi-agent coordination is inside the product (agent strategies in workflows), so it overlaps this category’s subject matter without being a coding-agent tool.

Cautions
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The license is not plain Apache: multi-tenant SaaS use needs a commercial license, so check the conditions before building a product on it.
It is a business-app platform, not a coding-agent orchestrator; nothing here manages worktrees, sessions, or parallel coding agents.
Cloud pricing moved to annual billing with message-credit metering, which is a cost model that punishes experimentation.
The Flowise shutdown argument, that reasoning models plus coding agents beat rigid visual workflows as tasks get complex, is the genre’s standing strategic risk.

Pricing
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Community Edition is free and self-hosted (open source under the modified Apache 2.0). Dify Cloud bills annually per workspace: Professional at $590 per workspace per year (5,000 message credits per month) and Team at $1,590 per workspace per year (10,000 message credits per month). Enterprise is custom private deployment.

Price history
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Date	Plan	Change	Source
2026-09-29	Professional (Cloud)	observed at $590 per workspace per year, annual billing	https://dify.ai/pricing
2026-09-29	Team (Cloud)	observed at $1590 per workspace per year, annual billing	https://dify.ai/pricing

Compared to
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Sim: the younger Apache-2.0 rival; Dify wins on ecosystem depth and enterprise options, Sim on license cleanliness and building modes.
Flowise: the archived predecessor in the genre; Dify is the migration target its self-hosters need.
AutoGPT: the other platform member of this category; AutoGPT sells autonomous workflows, Dify sells a broader app-building workspace.

Bottom line
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Recommended for teams building conversational and agentic business applications with RAG on a self-hosted or cloud platform, at scales where community depth matters. Not for coordinating parallel coding agents, and not for multi-tenant SaaS builders who cannot accept the commercial-license conditions.

Changes
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2026-09-29 - Created when the deferred framework-tier pile from the 2026-09-27 triage resolved.

References
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https://api.github.com/repos/langgenius/dify - GitHub API (200): 157,458 stars, 24,813 forks, pushed 2026-09-29, created 2023-04-12 (as of 2026-09-29)
https://dify.ai - official site (200): products, deployment options
https://dify.ai/pricing - pricing page (200): Professional $590 and Team $1590 per workspace per year, annual billing
https://docs.dify.ai - official documentation, live (200)
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/langgenius/dify/main/LICENSE - license text (200): modified Apache 2.0 with multi-tenant commercial conditions
https://api.github.com/repos/langgenius/dify/releases/latest - releases API (200): 1.17.1, published 2026-09-10
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/40121318 - launch thread (200): 185 points, 38 comments, 2024-04-22

Flowise

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Flowise was the drag-and-drop visual builder for LLM applications that reached 55,489 stars, was acquired by Workday in August 2025, and was archived in August 2026 (GitHub API, as of 2026-09-29).

Flowise’s shutdown note is the clearest public post-mortem of the visual-workflow genre: its own team wrote that coding agents made rigid low-code workflows obsolete.

What it is
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A visual builder that wrapped LangChain and LlamaIndex into chatflows and agentflows you could assemble on a canvas and self-host from Node (flowise 3.1.4 on npm). It launched publicly in April 2023, was built by FlowiseAI Inc, and claimed millions of downloads and 42,000+ GitHub stars by the time Workday announced the acquisition on 2025-08-14 (Workday newsroom). The license was Apache 2.0 with the enterprise directory under a commercial license.

Status
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Dead, archived by its maintainers. The README carries the banner “Flowise has been archived. Refer to Future of Flowise discussion 6727”, and that discussion states the reason: developers increasingly rely on coding agents for complex tasks, and “the typical rigid workflow low-code approach quickly hits the limit when it comes to complexity” (GitHub API, 2026-08). The last release was flowise@3.1.4 on 2026-07-29 and the last push 2026-08-13; the HN thread “Flowise is shutting down” drew 58 points on 2026-08-05. npm still recorded 11,923 downloads in the month before 2026-09-27, residual installs from a user base with nowhere to go.

Strengths
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At its peak it was the easiest on-ramp to LangChain and LlamaIndex, which is how it accumulated 55k stars.
Self-hosting was genuinely simple (one npm package, one command), so a long tail of internal tools still runs on it.
The acquisition price of attention (a Workday newsroom announcement) validated how many enterprises had built on it.

Cautions
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Archived means unmaintained: no fixes, no releases, and security issues like the exploited RCE from 2026-04 will never receive a patch.
Workday absorbed the team and the roadmap toward HR and finance agent building; the OSS is a stranded asset.
The stated shutdown reason is a strategic warning for every visual-workflow tool in this category, not just this one.
The community is still installing a dead package, which is exactly how unpatched deployments accumulate.

Pricing
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No active pricing: the project is archived, so its historical free self-host and paid cloud plans no longer exist as offerings. Existing self-hosted deployments carry only their own model and infrastructure bills.

Compared to
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Dify: the natural migration target in the genre, with a bigger community and active releases.
Sim: the younger Apache-2.0 alternative for visual agent workflow building.
AutoGPT: the category’s other workflow platform, alive and rebuilding; choose it for autonomous workflows rather than canvas building.

Bottom line
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Not recommended for anything new; this note is a death record in the same register as Crystal and Gas Town. Recommended only for existing self-hosters planning an exit to Dify or Sim, and for anyone studying why the lowest-code end of the workflow genre died first.

Changes
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2026-09-29 - Created when the deferred framework-tier pile from the 2026-09-27 triage resolved.

References
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https://api.github.com/repos/FlowiseAI/Flowise - GitHub API (200): 55,489 stars, 25,049 forks, pushed 2026-08-13, created 2023-03-31 (as of 2026-09-29)
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FlowiseAI/Flowise/main/README.md - README (200): “Flowise has been archived” banner (critical source)
https://api.github.com/repos/FlowiseAI/Flowise/discussions/6727 - shutdown discussion via GitHub API (200): stated reason, coding agents versus rigid low-code (critical source)
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/49176920 - “Flowise is shutting down” thread (200): 58 points, 45 comments, 2026-08-05
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/47703569 - exploited max-severity RCE thread (200): 3 points, 2026-04-09 (critical source)
https://newsroom.workday.com/2025-08-14-Workday-Acquires-Flowise,-Bringing-Powerful-AI-Agent-Builder-Capabilities-to-the-Workday-Platform - Workday acquisition press release (200)
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/44905403 - acquisition thread (200): 10 points, 2025-08-14
https://registry.npmjs.org/flowise - npm metadata (200): flowise 3.1.4, license “SEE LICENSE IN LICENSE.md”
https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-month/flowise - npm downloads API (200): 11,923 downloads, month ending 2026-09-27
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FlowiseAI/Flowise/main/LICENSE.md - license text (200): Apache 2.0 plus commercial-license portions

Sim

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sim is the Apache-2.0, YC X25-backed open-source workspace for building, deploying, and monitoring AI agent workflows on a visual canvas, self-hostable or consumed as cloud, pitched as the open n8n alternative.

Sim is what Flowise could have been: a clean-Apache visual agent workflow builder with real launch momentum, now positioned to inherit the users that Flowise’s archive stranded.

What it is
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A collaborative workspace where agent systems are built visually on a canvas, through chat, or in code, with a knowledge base, tables, files, and block-by-block run logs (sim.ai, docs.sim.ai). It is TypeScript, self-hosted via Docker or rented as Sim Cloud, built by the Sim Studio team out of Y Combinator X25 (Launch HN, 2025-05-21). The repo sits at 29,749 stars with 3,847 forks, Apache-2.0, created 2025-01-05, and its description claims 100,000+ builders (GitHub API, as of 2026-09-29).

Status
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Active: last push 2026-09-29, release v0.9.5 on 2026-09-29, the same day (GitHub API, as of 2026-09-29). Three HN launches mark the trajectory: 196 points for the first Show HN (2025-04-28), 55 points for the YC Launch HN (2025-05-21), and 240 points for “Sim, Apache-2.0 n8n alternative” (2025-12-11). Pre-1.0 (v0.9.x) despite the scale, so the API surface is still moving.

Strengths
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The license is genuinely clean: Apache-2.0 with no SaaS-restriction fine print, which in this genre is now a differentiator after Flowise’s restricted license and Dify’s conditions.
Building modes cover the spectrum: visual canvas for operators, chat for iteration, code for engineers.
Fast, durable community growth: about 30k stars in 20 months with three HN launches above 55 points.
Observability is productized (block-by-block logs, enterprise access control, SSO, SOC2 messaging for the paid tiers).

Cautions
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Pre-1.0 software at v0.9.5: expect breaking changes on a project this young.
The genre risk is unchanged: Flowise’s shutdown note argued coding agents erode rigid visual workflows, and Sim sits in exactly that lane.
Seat-based cloud pricing with credit metering will punish bursty experimentation the way most SaaS builders do.
“100,000+ builders” is a repo-description claim I could not independently verify.

Pricing
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Free tier at $0 (1,000 one-time credits, weekly refresh, up to 3 seats). Pro at $25 per user per month (6,000 credits per month, more workspace capacity), Max at $100 per user per month (25,000 credits per month, SSO, SOC2 compliance, self-hosting options, dedicated support). Annual billing saves 15 percent.

Price history
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Date	Plan	Change	Source
2026-09-29	Free	observed at $0 with 1,000 one-time credits	https://sim.ai/pricing
2026-09-29	Pro	observed at $25 per user/month	https://sim.ai/pricing
2026-09-29	Max	observed at $100 per user/month	https://sim.ai/pricing

Compared to
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Dify: the genre’s giant; Sim wins on license cleanliness and building modes, Dify on ecosystem and enterprise depth.
Flowise: the archived predecessor; Sim is the like-for-like replacement for its canvas builders.
AutoGPT: the category’s other workflow platform; AutoGPT leans autonomous, Sim leans collaborative building.

Bottom line
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Recommended for teams that want a self-hostable visual agent workflow builder under a clean Apache-2.0 license and can live with pre-1.0 churn. Not for coding-agent orchestration, and not for anyone needing long-term API stability guarantees today.

Changes
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2026-09-29 - Created when the deferred framework-tier pile from the 2026-09-27 triage resolved.

References
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https://api.github.com/repos/simstudioai/sim - GitHub API (200): 29,749 stars, 3,847 forks, Apache-2.0, pushed 2026-09-29, created 2025-01-05 (as of 2026-09-29)
https://sim.ai - official site (200): workspace products (workflows, knowledge base, tables, logs, enterprise)
https://sim.ai/pricing - pricing page (200): Free $0, Pro $25/user/month, Max $100/user/month
https://docs.sim.ai - official documentation, live (200)
https://api.github.com/repos/simstudioai/sim/releases/latest - releases API (200): v0.9.5, published 2026-09-29
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/46234186 - “Sim, Apache-2.0 n8n alternative” thread (200): 240 points, 61 comments, 2025-12-11
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/43823096 - first Show HN (200): 196 points, 58 comments, 2025-04-28
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/44052766 - Launch HN: Sim Studio, YC X25 (200): 55 points, 32 comments, 2025-05-21

low-code on tomrochette.com

Dify

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Flowise

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low-code on tomrochette.com

Dify

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