Dify vs loomcycle.

Dify is a visual workflow + RAG studio with 158k GitHub stars and a drag-and-drop canvas aimed at mid-sized teams. The production shape is a 16-container Docker Compose stack with an 8 GiB RAM floor, under a modified Apache licence that forbids multi-tenant SaaS resale. loomcycle is one ~80 MB Go binary that owns the agent loop end-to-end, under one Apache-2.0 licence with no feature gating.

What each one is

The box count

The headline difference between the two deployment stories, in boxes:

Where they overlap

Both support many model providers through one abstraction. Both ship MCP support on both the client and server sides. Both expose a browser-facing admin UI. Both have a tool / plugin system for extending the agent's capability. Both have a schedule and webhook trigger surface. Both are Apache-2.0-derived, both are self-hostable, both can run entirely without the vendor's cloud. If what you need is "a chat UI backed by an agent that reads a corpus and answers," either one will carry you.

Capability matrix

Rows marked ✦ are where loomcycle's answer is materially different from Dify's. Some of those rows favour loomcycle, some favour Dify; the mark flags a real divergence, not a value judgement.

Where Dify fits better

Straightforward cases. Pick Dify if:

• Your buyer is a non-engineer who wants a drag-and-drop canvas to build a chat workflow or a RAG agent without reading YAML. Dify's visual builder is the most mature in the category; LoomBoard's canvas is thinner.
• Your workload is RAG-heavy and you want a Knowledge Pipeline that ingests PDF, PPT, Notion and web into one of six vector databases out of the box. loomcycle's Document primitive is good, but Dify's RAG surface is deeper.
• You want an established hosted cloud with a published tier ladder ($0 → $59 → $159 → custom) and don't want to self-host anything. loomcycle has no hosted offering today.
• You want a plugin marketplace with a creator profile system and the critical mass that comes with 158k stars. The Dify plugin ecosystem is bigger than loomcycle's today.
• Your product is a chat-UI-plus-corpus for internal users, and the operator time to run a 16-container stack is a cost you are happy to pay for the UI polish.

Where loomcycle fits better

Also straightforward. Pick loomcycle if:

• You want one binary, not sixteen containers. One process. 80 MB of RAM. A 1 GiB VPS. A laptop. A homelab NAS. An air-gapped machine. Dify's deployment floor is 8 GiB RAM and a Postgres plus a Redis plus a Weaviate plus a Next.js app; loomcycle's floor is a Go binary and a config file.
• You want a Decision model as a general primitive. The Decision tool takes choice, noul or score questions and returns calibrated probabilities. Model aliases carry a kind tag; a chat model wired into a decision slot refuses config load. Dify agents prompt the model for JSON and parse; the probability vector and the kind-typed slots are a loomcycle-only cell.
• You want teams as a single file. A TeamDef declares nodes (agent, decision, parallel, consolidator), transitions, pushback edges and iteration caps in one declarative document. Dify's multi-agent story lives in a workflow graph on the canvas, which is powerful but is not a one-file artefact an operator can version-control, diff and ship.
• You want a whole-deployment Snapshot. One Snapshot op captures every def plus runtime state and restores on another box with cred-scan at export. Dify's build-time home snapshots are config-only.
• You care about memory quality with a published number. Bi-temporal + subject-document identity with LoCoMo 0.74; the reranker lift from a decision model is a published 0.588 → 0.740. Dify's memory is per-conversation and has no published benchmark.
• You want RBAC, SSO and multi-tenancy in the OSS build. loomcycle's tenant isolation, operator tokens, per-user token minting and declared principals are all under Apache-2.0. Dify's SSO is Enterprise-tier-only.
• You intend to run a multi-tenant SaaS on top. loomcycle's Apache-2.0 permits it; the Dify Open Source License forbids reselling Dify as a multi-tenant SaaS without a commercial licence.
• You want a bundled dev toolchain and headless Chromium so an agent can lint, test, build or scrape without the operator provisioning them per project.

A note on the licence difference

Dify's licence is often described in third-party coverage as "Apache-2.0" — it is not. It is the Dify Open Source License, a modified Apache 2.0 with two added conditions: (a) you may not resell Dify as a multi-tenant SaaS without a commercial licence, and (b) the Dify logo and copyright may not be removed. Loomcycle is Apache-2.0 with no additional conditions. For teams whose end product is an internal tool this doesn't matter; for teams whose product is a hosted SaaS built on top of the runtime, it is the difference between "ship it" and "contact sales."

curl -L https://github.com/denn-gubsky/loomcycle/releases/latest/download/loomcycle-$(uname -s | tr A-Z a-z)-$(uname -m) -o loomcycle
chmod +x loomcycle
./loomcycle serve --config loomcycle.yaml