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Dify vs LM Studio

Bottom line

Dify has a free plan plus paid upgrades, while LM Studio is free.

Which one should you try?

Dify

Freemium

Best for Teams building RAG, chatbot or agent apps with a visual builder

Visit Dify See full review

LM Studio

Free

Best for People who want a desktop app for downloading and chatting with local models

Visit LM Studio See full review

Pricing, capabilities and platforms side by side. Prices are as of the "Pricing checked" date in the table.

Dify

Dify

LLM app platform with visual workflows, RAG, agents and app APIs. Free Sandbox and self-hosted Community edition.

LM Studio

LM Studio

LM Studio is a free desktop app for local models with a headless server (llmster), local APIs and SDKs. We ran llmster on a CPU-only server and measured install, load time and offline behavior.

AttributeDifyLM Studio
PricingFreemiumFree
PriceFree Sandbox; Professional $590/workspace/year; Team $1,590/workspace/year (annual billing)Free to run models locally; optional cloud plans: Bionic+ $20/mo, Pro $100/mo
Pricing checkedOct 17, 2026Oct 16, 2026
Free trialNot statedNot stated
Open sourceNoNo
Has APIYesYes
Self-hosted optionYesYes
PlatformsDify Cloud (web); self-hosted with Docker Compose (min. 2 CPU cores, 4 GiB RAM)macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows, Linux (x64 and ARM64)
Released—2023-05
Pros
  • Workflows, RAG, agents and logging in one platform, with an API for every app.
  • Connects to many model providers, including any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
  • Free self-hosted Community edition via Docker Compose, alongside hosted Dify Cloud.
  • A desktop app and a headless server (llmster), so you can chat with models or serve them to your apps.
  • Local APIs plus Python and TypeScript SDKs.
  • Works offline: with its update and extension hosts blocked, it still loaded and served the model.
  • Used 2 GB of memory with our 3B model, a little less than Ollama's 2.2 GB.
Cons
  • The modified Apache 2.0 license requires authorization for multi-tenant services and bars removing frontend branding.
  • Multiple workspaces and commercial license authorization are Enterprise features.
  • Model API usage is billed by providers once included cloud credits run out.
  • Slow cold load: lms load took 44.6 s, about 34 s of it before the engine started, with nothing in the logs to explain the wait.
  • Closed source and free under LM Studio's terms; only the lms CLI is open source (MIT).
  • Ollama generated text up to 1.38x faster on the same model and cores.

Made up your mind?

Dify

Freemium

Best for Teams building RAG, chatbot or agent apps with a visual builder

Visit Dify See full review

LM Studio

Free

Best for People who want a desktop app for downloading and chatting with local models

Visit LM Studio See full review

Related comparisons

Free trials & curated lists

Specs come from each tool's own site and docs (how we test). AIDiveForge is editorially independent.

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