Dify is an open source development platform for building applications powered by large language models. It combines a visual workflow builder, prompt management, retrieval augmented generation, and agent capabilities into one interface. Developers can design chat assistants, text generation apps, and multi step agent workflows without wiring every component from scratch. Dify supports many model providers and includes tools for managing datasets, testing prompts, and monitoring how applications perform once deployed. It can run in the cloud or be self hosted for teams that need control over data.
The platform targets developers, product teams, and organizations that want to ship LLM features quickly while keeping the option to self host. It fits teams building internal assistants, customer facing chatbots, and document based question answering over private knowledge. Because it wraps common building blocks into a visual and API driven interface, it lowers the effort needed to move from prototype to production. Companies that prefer open source tooling and data ownership often choose it over fully closed hosted services for these use cases.
In practice, users connect a model, upload knowledge sources, and assemble workflows that combine prompts, retrieval, and agent steps. Applications are exposed as APIs or embeddable widgets. Built in logging and annotation help teams review outputs and improve quality over time.
