You’ve narrowed it down to Stack AI and Dify AI. Both promise visual AI workflow building, both claim enterprise-ready features, and both seem reasonably priced. But marketing pages won’t tell you that one requires your developers to build everything, while the other lets your entire team create AI tools.

Here’s what you need to know.

Side-by-side comparison: Stack AI vs Dify AI

Ease of use

Dify AI is low-code

Dify AI’s visual interface suggests the building process is simple. However, when you open a template and start customizing, you’ll see language reserved for developers and users with advanced technical skills. The platform focuses on orchestration, giving fine-grained control over the functioning of the entire tool.

Extra power sounds like a plus, but it’ll keep your non-technical teams frozen as they try to learn programming concepts such as managing arrays, assigning variables, and handling JSON outputs.

This makes Dify AI a better match for developers, as it abstracts some time-consuming coding processes. From a business perspective, giving your IT team better tools is a good choice, but it doesn’t help scale building solutions: you’ll still have to hire more developers to ship more tools, upgrade workflows, and implement AI across teams.

Stack AI is no-code

Stack AI takes care of orchestration behind the scenes to provide a no-code experience that anyone can learn and effectively use. It doesn’t require coding knowledge to use, transforming complicated technical terms into understandable concepts.

In the visual workflow builder, users can drop nodes that represent inputs, LLMs, data sources, and outputs. These can be connected to transmit data and actions between each other, with a set of robust controls to change how they work.

As users test their projects, they can see each node working in real time, getting a clear view of what happens as it runs. This makes it intuitive to build new functionality or troubleshoot existing ones.

Since the learning curve is smooth, non-technical employees can build tools to solve problems they face every day, removing the burden from developers and IT teams. This effectively scales implementation and distribution of AI tools, having a more immediate impact on productivity.

Dify AI’s integrations require dev expertise

Dify AI’s Marketplace gathers all available integrations on the platform. These were created either by the development team, community members, and third-party companies, extending the platform’s functionality.

As you find useful integrations, you must first install them into your account, exposing the corresponding nodes for future projects. Then, you must connect these to other nodes already on the canvas to pass data or run other actions. However, connecting the nodes isn’t enough: you’ll often have to provide API keys, set up an initial configuration, and interface with external platforms extensively before everything is fully functional.

Stack AI’s integrations are easy to set up

Stack AI integrates with a wide range of apps and enterprise systems, offering a simple connection experience, staple of many SaaS apps you already use for work. These include, among others:

• Knowledge and file management platforms like Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Notion

• Cloud infrastructure platforms like Azure Blob Storage, AWS S3, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, or Pinecone

• CRM platforms such as Salesforce and HubSpot

• And dozens more including Excel, Outlook, Gmail, Zendesk, Jira and Zapier.

When you drop a HubSpot node, for example, you can start the connection process within the editor canvas. This opens an authentication popup, where you only have to log into your HubSpot account, approve permissions with one click, and come back to Stack AI. The node is now ready to use and connect to your other nodes.

Interfaces and usage methods

Dify AI offers 3 

Dify has a limited selection of usage methods: a chat assistant, embedding in a website, and API access.

Stack AI offers 11

Beyond building the tool’s workflow, you can expose it to your team via 11 interfaces and interaction methods. You can export as:

Chat assistant has the core features of an AI chatbot, with tools to send messages and attach files

• Website chatbot deploys your tool to your website

• Form, providing input fields and downloadable outputs for single-run-type tools, useful for running quick reports or assessments

• Advanced form provides similar functionality to the above, offering more tools to improve user experience, with rich text formatting (including links and embedded content)  to label the actions available on each input field

• Batch interface lets you add or upload lists so your workflow can run once for each item with a single click

• Chrome extension interface places your tools on your browser, so you can interact as you use SaaS

• Voice assistant, using text-to-speech and vice-versa to enable a voice-driven user experience

• Slack app, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp/SMS for integrating with communication apps

• And API for programmatic access.

This range makes Stack AI more flexible when deploying your solutions, enabling a better problem/solution fit when compared with Dify AI.

Support and growth

Dify AI relies on a developer community

Dify AI focuses on developing its platform and providing cloud services, but doesn’t position itself as a growth partner. It doesn’t have dedicated vendor support, defaulting to a developer community, where people help each other to find solutions to issues they run into as they build.

If you have time and developers, community-driven support can be enough, but only if you’re not experiencing a lot of blockers as you build. Still, if you hit a major problem, there’s limited help to solve it as soon as possible, meaning your tools might need extra rounds of testing so they don’t break on the job.

Stack AI is a software platform and offers dedicated support

Beyond offering a generative AI automation platform, Stack AI also offers a range of services to make sure you implement it successfully. Your company is assigned an engineer that will help you implement projects. There are onboarding processes in place, so you and your teams can get up to speed with all the core concepts. You can book in-person workshops to walk all stakeholders through building procedures and objectives. There’s a product-based mindset of building tools to solve at first low-hanging fruit problems, improving these tools to cover more ground, and then building custom tooling for more advanced problems.

On top of this, Stack AI regularly calculates ROI so you’re sure you’re actually growing, not just surrendering to the AI hype.

Data privacy and security

Dify AI has a mixed US/China footprint

Dify AI (LangGenius Inc.) is a Delaware-registered, California-headquartered company, operating the Dify AI Cloud service. It’s primarily under US federal and state law. The founders and part of the engineering team are former Tencent DevOps staff and maintain a research & development office in China.

In terms of regulatory certifications, Dify obtained SOC 2 Type I and II and offers a GDPR data protection agreement.

While these signals are reassuring, Article 7 of the 2017 People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) National Intelligence Law obliges Chinese citizens and organizations to assist in intelligence work, often instructed to keep their activities secret. The exposure of the US-based LangGenius isn’t direct, but Chinese nationals involved with the organization may receive requests to cooperate, as well as other indirectly connected PRC-based companies.

PRC’s authorities could, in principle, compel China-based employees to access Dify client data that they can reach. If such staff have production-level privileges, data at Dify could be accessed and exfiltrated by company staff. While SOC controls introduce system hardening against these events, privileged personnel could override security features such as RBAC.

The US and EU applied targeted restrictions on Chinese technology use recently due to security concerns. While there are no blanket bans, current geopolitical and economic tensions require a nuanced and risk-aware view.

Since Dify AI also offers a self-hostable option, you can go around these issues. Still, make sure to carefully analyze the source code in the unlikely event that there are telemetry or backdoor methods in place that could put your company’s data at risk.

Stack AI is fully based in the US

Stack AI was founded and runs entirely in the US, complying with all its laws. It’s SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA-compliant, displaying its high data privacy and security commitment.

Its cloud computing infrastructure is also in the country, making sure that both data sovereignty and residency needs are addressed. You can self-host it in your premises as well and ask any questions about privacy and security you need.

Dify AI vs Stack AI: Which is best?

Stack AI and Dify AI represent different approaches in generative AI workflow automation. There are differences in difficulty level, target audience, growth and support, as well as a data privacy and security component. When choosing the best tool, consider your current workflows, your workforce, pricing constraints, and whether you can tolerate the risk exposure.

Learn more about Stack AI: book a demo today and start scaling with generative AI.