head to head · open source
Dify vs agent-rules-books
Dify has 156,215 GitHub stars, 24,668 forks, 1,067 open issues and last shipped yesterday. agent-rules-books has 2,816 stars, 499 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Dify leads on adoption by 5,447% (156,215 vs 2,816 stars). Dify is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; agent-rules-books is written in various languages under MIT. Dify has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, agent-rules-books 18%. Dify was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Dify | agent-rules-books | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 156K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | — |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 25K | ⑂ 499 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Dify if
- You weight community size — 156K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick agent-rules-books if
- You want the agent-rules-books feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- You evaluated both and agent-rules-books fits your workflow better
About Dify
Dify is an open source LLM application development platform built in TypeScript. It provides a visual interface for designing, testing, and deploying AI workflows, RAG pipelines, and agentic systems without writing extensive code. The platform lives in the generative AI development ecosystem and targets teams needing to move from prototype to production using consistent tooling across environments.
About agent-rules-books
agent rules books is an MIT licensed, tool agnostic collection of AGENTS.md rules and agent skills, distilled from classic software engineering books, that installs into AI coding agents such as Codex, Cursor and Claude Code to steer them toward better refactoring, architecture, domain driven design and code quality.
read the full agent-rules-books overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Dify or agent-rules-books more popular?
Dify has 156,215 GitHub stars and agent-rules-books has 2,816. Dify has the larger community by that measure.
Are Dify and agent-rules-books free?
Both are open source. Dify has no licence declared in this registry, and agent-rules-books is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Dify and agent-rules-books?
Dify is written in TypeScript and agent-rules-books in various languages. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Dify or agent-rules-books?
Choose Dify if you want the larger community (156,215 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose agent-rules-books if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.