Best Dify alternatives in 2026: open-source and paid options

Dify has become a go-to for product teams that want to move from prototype to production quickly. It now calls itself a platform for production-ready agentic workflows: a visual builder for workflows, chat apps and agents, Knowledge Pipelines for RAG, a large plugin marketplace, and deployment on Dify Cloud, a self-hosted Community Edition, or Dify Enterprise in a VPC, on-prem or air-gapped.

Teams compare Dify alternatives for a handful of reasons: its modified Apache License restricts multi-tenant hosting, it has no voice agent product, we found no built-in evaluation suite in its docs, and its Enterprise support is customer success rather than engineers who build with you. This guide compares the main options as of September 2026, using each vendor's own pages, listed at the end.

Quick comparison

Flowise, which earlier versions of this guide listed, reached end of life on August 31, 2026; see below.

What to look for in a Dify alternative

1. License terms that fit how you ship. Dify's license bars operating a multi-tenant environment without written authorization and requires keeping its logo and copyright in the console and apps. If you plan to host agents for many customers or business units, check this first.
2. Agentic orchestration that scales. Planning, tool use, memory, retries and guardrails should be first-class, along with human approvals at risky steps.
3. Knowledge and RAG depth. Look at ingestion pipelines, retrieval filters that respect permissions, citations, and how easily you can swap vector stores and models.
4. Evaluations and observability. Offline and live evaluations, traces with per-step latency and cost, and alerts keep quality high and spend predictable.
5. Deployment. SaaS is simple, but many teams need a private VPC, on-prem Kubernetes or an isolated network, with SSO and audit trails.

Top Dify alternatives

As a baseline, Dify's strengths are real: a free cloud Sandbox, a self-hosted Community Edition, a marketplace of plugins for models, tools, data sources and MCP, apps that publish as MCP servers, human input steps in workflows, and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 per its homepage. Here is how the alternatives compare.

Langflow

Langflow is an MIT licensed, Python-based builder for agents and RAG applications that can also publish flows as MCP servers and call other MCP servers. It runs as a desktop app, a Python package, a Docker container or a headless runtime on Kubernetes, and recent releases added a Guardrails component, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, built-in traces and OpenTelemetry export. It is the most permissive license in this list. Plan for gaps around built-in evaluations, which are not documented, and enterprise SSO and RBAC enforcement, which are plugins outside open-source Langflow.

n8n

n8n is fair-code workflow automation with AI built in: an AI Agent node with tools and sub-agents, n8n Agents in preview since September 2026, a Guardrails node, human approval before an agent runs a chosen tool, quick and metric-based evaluations, and knowledge bases on n8n Cloud. It fits teams that automate processes across many apps. Its Sustainable Use License limits use to internal business, non-commercial or personal purposes.

Zapier

Zapier is the no-code option, connecting 9,000+ apps. Zapier Agents draw on files and app knowledge sources, call other agents and pause for approvals, and chatbots embed as a widget on your site. Zapier runs only in its own cloud, hosted on AWS in the United States, and we found no evaluation datasets or scoring for agents in its documentation, so complex AI pipelines may outgrow it.

Sana

Sana, part of Workday since November 2025, is an AI platform for knowledge work: no-code agents, scheduled workflows, enterprise search across 100+ apps, and Sana Learn for training content. It offers SSO, SCIM and audit logging, managed hosting by default with deployment on your own cloud or a single-tenant option for Enterprise, and says it does not use customer data to train models. It fits when the goal is trusted answers and automation for every employee rather than building custom agents for products or operations.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Within Microsoft 365, Copilot Studio stands out: agents and workflows that publish to Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, multi-agent orchestration, OpenAI and Anthropic models, agent evaluations and a Microsoft Entra Agent ID for each agent. The trade-off is hosting: it runs only as a Microsoft cloud service. If your stack is standardized on Microsoft, it is the fastest path to internal agents.

Dynamiq

Dynamiq is a platform for chat, voice and workflow agents, with guardrails, evals and observability on the same engine, deployed in Dynamiq Cloud or inside your own environment. The agent engine is an open-source Python SDK under Apache-2.0; the platform around it is not open source.

• Agent Builder: a visual canvas and the open-source Python SDK on one engine, with Choice and rules nodes, approvals with editable fields on any tool step, workflows generated from a prompt, and versions with rollback.
• AI Coworker: an agent with its own cloud sandbox computer (Linux shell, files, browser automation and live web previews), connectors, a skills library, scheduled tasks and subagents, in the browser and in Slack, Microsoft Teams and Telegram.
• Voice Agents: inbound calls over WebRTC, SIP and WebSocket, with per-turn latency measurement and simulations scored by an LLM judge.
• Agentic memory: session memory scoped by user and session, with recent, relevant or both retrieval, and long-term memory where the agent itself decides when to save and recall durable, user-scoped facts through remember and recall tools, updating an existing fact rather than saving a near duplicate.
• Knowledge: ingestion pipelines, permission-aware retrieval filters, knowledge graphs, and document parsing and extraction.
• Integrations: 2,100+ app integrations and 11,800+ actions, plus MCP servers and per-user connections.
• Models and AI Gateway: 29 model providers in the SDK and the most-used models behind one OpenAI-compatible AI Gateway endpoint, plus open models served on vLLM and LoRA fine-tuning.
• Guardrails and approvals: detect PII and prompt injection, with policy detection, validators and execution approvals.
• Evals and observability: datasets built from traces, LLM-as-a-judge, predefined and code metrics, and real-time evaluations on live deployments; traces with cost and latency per node, monitoring, and an AI agent that surfaces issues from production traces.
• Deployment: Dynamiq Cloud, or self-hosted on AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud, Red Hat OpenShift or any Kubernetes cluster, or on-prem, with self-hosting on Enterprise. Fully isolated or air-gapped setups are delivered with our engineers. Available on AWS Marketplace, Microsoft Azure Marketplace and IBM Marketplace.
• Security and compliance: SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR. Guardrails and approvals come on every plan, and SSO (OIDC with Okta and Microsoft Entra ID) on Enterprise.
• Pricing: free to start ($0), and Enterprise with custom pricing.
• Forward-deployed engineers: a bootcamp in your environment, your first production agent shipped with your team, then a handover.

For a row-by-row view, see Dynamiq vs Dify.

What happened to Flowise?

Flowise, a visual builder for chatbots and agents, announced on July 29, 2026 that it was winding down and froze development that day. Its GitHub repository was archived on August 13, and it reached end of life on August 31, 2026. The Apache 2.0 source remains available, but npm packages and Docker images are marked deprecated, so it is not a fit for new projects.

Where Dify fits and what to choose next

Dify is a strong, community-backed foundation for LLM apps and RAG, and a sensible default for prototypes. If your roadmap includes voice agents, evaluations on live traffic, hosting agents for many tenants, or a deployment in your own environment with engineers who ship the first agent with your team, put Dynamiq on your shortlist alongside the alternatives above.

FAQ

Is Dify open source?

Dify's code is public on GitHub under a modified version of the Apache License 2.0. It adds two conditions: you need Dify's written permission to run it as a multi-tenant service, where each workspace counts as a tenant, and you may not remove or change the Dify logo or copyright in its console or apps. That makes it source-available rather than open source in the strict sense. Dynamiq's SDK uses the standard Apache-2.0 license without those conditions; the Dynamiq platform around it is not open source.

Is Dify free?

Dify Cloud has a free Sandbox plan with 200 message credits for trying its core features, and the Community Edition is free to self-host as a single workspace, per Dify's pricing page. Paid Professional, Team and Enterprise plans add credits, workspaces and support. Dynamiq offers a free plan to start, plus custom Enterprise pricing.

What is the best open-source alternative to Dify?

It depends on what you need to be open. Langflow is MIT-licensed and suits Python developers who want a visual builder they can extend. If you want an Apache-2.0 agent engine, with voice agents, evaluations on live traffic and self-hosting in your own environment available on top, look at Dynamiq. Flowise, once a common pick, reached end of life in August 2026.

Can you self-host Dify?

Yes. The Community Edition runs on your own servers as a single workspace. Running Dify for many workspaces or customers needs Dify's written authorization under its license.

How does Dynamiq compare with Dify?

See the Dynamiq vs Dify comparison for license, deployment, voice agents, evaluations and how to migrate.

Sources

Vendor facts were checked on September 29, 2026 against these pages:

• Dify: homepage, pricing, Enterprise, license, Human Input node, MCP publishing
• Langflow: homepage, guardrails, traces, license
• n8n: pricing, license, agents
• Zapier: homepage, Agents, security and compliance
• Sana: homepage, Sana and Workday, security
• Microsoft Copilot Studio: overview, what's new
• Flowise: sunset announcement