So you've narrowed it down to StackAI and Dify. Both offer visual AI workflow builders, enterprise-ready features, and fair pricing. But what you won’t see on the marketing pages is that one is built with developers in mind, while the other empowers your whole team to create AI tools.

In this article, we’re going to break down what sets StackAI and Dify apart, from ease of use and integrations to performance, security, and how each platform scales across teams.

Side-by-Side Comparison: StackAI vs Dify

Before we get into the details, the table below puts StackAI and Dify side by side to show how they differ in usability, setup, security, and overall scope. It gives you a sense of how each platform approaches building, managing, and scaling AI workflows across a team.

Ease of Use

When it comes to how easily teams can get started with each, the difference between Stack AI and Dify AI becomes clear. One leans toward a low-code approach built for technically-minded users, while the other focuses on a truly no-code experience designed so anyone can build, connect, and deploy AI solutions with ease.

Dify: Best for Developers

Dify's visual interface suggests the building process is simple. However, when you start customizing your workflows, you’ll notice that the platform still relies on concepts familiar to developers or users with more advanced technical skills. Dify focuses on orchestration, giving users detailed control over workflows and agent behaviors.

That extra power might sound like a plus, but it can leave non-technical teams struggling to understand programming concepts such as managing arrays, assigning variables, and handling JSON outputs.

Thus, Dify suits technical and semi-technical users who want low-code customization and direct API control, rather than complete no-code simplicity. 

From a business perspective, though, this can present challenges when it comes to scaling solutions. You may still need to rely on developers to move AI projects into production, upgrade workflows with new features, and implement systems across teams.

StackAI: The No-Code/Low Code Enterprise AI Orchestration Platform

StackAI handles orchestration behind the scenes to deliver a true no-code experience that anyone can quickly learn and apply.

In its visual workflow builder, you can drag and connect nodes representing inputs, outputs, AI agents, knowledge bases, app integrations, logic, and utility functions. Each node can be configured through an intuitive interface, with real-time feedback that shows how data flows and decisions are made during execution. 

This visual transparency makes it easier to understand, test, and improve workflows without writing code. Because the learning curve is smooth, non-technical employees can independently create AI systems to solve everyday challenges, reducing reliance on IT teams and accelerating AI adoption across your organization, having a more immediate impact on productivity.

🔗 Learn More: Read customer success stories here.

Dify Integrations: Dev Expertise Required

Dify's tools and marketplace gathers all available integrations on the platform. These were created either by their 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.

StackAI Integrations: Seamless and Organized

StackAI 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, Box, 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

When it comes to how your workflows can be used and shared, the two platforms take slightly different paths. Both let you interact with your AI projects in multiple ways, but the range of options, and how easily they can be deployed, varies between them.

Dify: Limited to Chatbots

Dify offers three main ways to embed its chatbots. Let’s have a look at each one.

The first option is a full-page embed using an iFrame. This lets you place the chatbot directly into your website which is great if you want it to appear as part of a landing page, help centre, or standalone support portal. It’s very easy to set up, since it only requires copying a short piece of HTML code. The trade-off, though, is flexibility. Because the chatbot sits inside an iFrame, there’s limited room for custom styling or responsive behavior, and it can feel more like an add-on than a native part of the page.

The second option is a floating chat widget that appears in the bottom-right corner of your site. This is the more familiar approach, the same kind of chat bubble you’d find with tools like Intercom or Drift. It’s straightforward to integrate and can be customized with colors, avatars, or basic user variables. For teams that already manage a website, this is a clean, lightweight solution. The downside is that it still needs some front-end knowledge to configure properly, and advanced flexibility often calls for a developer.

Finally, there’s the Chrome extension. This lets you access or share your chatbot instantly through your browser, without embedding it into a website at all. It’s handy for internal testing, demos, or customer-support teams that work primarily in Chrome. But since it’s browser-specific, it’s not designed for production-level deployment or public access.

Dify’s interface options are practical and simple to deploy, but they’re still web-centric and slightly more technical to configure. They make sense for teams that are comfortable editing code snippets but don’t yet offer the same plug-and-play experience you’d expect from a fully no-code tool.

StackAI: Giving Your Agents a Face

StackAI offers seven interface options: Form, Chat Assistant, Website Chatbot, Batch, API, Slack App, and Microsoft Teams.

The Form interface is designed for structured tasks, such as collecting information, automating reports, or submitting data to other systems. The Chat Assistant provides a conversational experience that works well for knowledge retrieval, process guidance, or interactive support. The Website Chatbot can be embedded on any site in just a few clicks, making it ideal for customer-facing or internal helpdesk scenarios.

The Batch interface allows teams to process multiple records or queries at once, useful for operations or analytics workflows that need to handle large volumes of data efficiently. Through the API, you can integrate StackAI directly into existing products or dashboards, extending its functionality without rebuilding from scratch.

StackAI also includes Slack App and Microsoft Teams integrations, which have now been deprecated but highlight how the platform has evolved to connect across communication channels.

StackAI has the ability to fully customize the interface. You can tailor the logo, cover image, background, and text to match your brand identity, so your AI applications looks and feels like an in-house product.

This range makes StackAI more flexible when deploying your solutions, solidifying its place as a better problem/solution fit when compared with Dify.

Support and Growth

Beyond features and interfaces, support can make or break how quickly teams adopt a platform. The difference between StackAI and Dify becomes clear here too: one focuses on community-driven help, while the other takes a more hands-on approach to customer success.

Dify Relies on a Developer Community

Dify 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.

StackAI Offers White-Glove Support

StackAI has streamlined onboarding processes in place, so you and your teams can get up to speed with all the core concepts. A Proof-of-Value period ensures that your team goes after the highest-value use cases, and in-person kickoffs will take 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, StackAI regularly calculates ROI so you’re sure you’re actually growing, not just surrendering to the AI hype.

Data Privacy and Security

When it comes to data privacy and security, where and how a platform handles information matters just as much as what it can do. Both StackAI and Dify take different approaches here,  from where their systems are hosted to the compliance standards they follow.

Dify: A Mixed US-China Footprint

Dify (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 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.

StackAI: Fully US-Based

StackAI 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.

🔗 Learn More: Read a full breakdown of governance on StackAI here.

Dify vs StackAI: Which is Best?

Stack AI and Dify AI represent different approaches to difficulty level, target audience, growth and support, as well as data privacy. When choosing the best tool, consider your current workflows, your workforce, pricing constraints, and your tolerance for risk exposure. Want to learn more about StackAI? Book a demo today and start scaling with enterprise-grade AI agents.