head to head · open source
Dify vs PixelRAG
Dify has 160,251 GitHub stars, 25,336 forks, 1,067 open issues and last shipped yesterday. PixelRAG has 10,834 stars, 979 forks, 19 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Dify leads on adoption by 1,379% (160,251 vs 10,834 stars). Dify is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; PixelRAG is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Dify has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, PixelRAG 9%. Dify was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (agent, ai), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | PixelRAG | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 160K | ★ 11K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 25K | ⑂ 979 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Dify if
- You weight community size — 160K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick PixelRAG if
- You want the PixelRAG feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and PixelRAG fits your workflow better
About Dify
Dify Cloud · Self hosting · Documentation · Dify edition overview Dify is an open source LLM app development platform. Its intuitive interface combines AI workflow, RAG pipeline, agent capabilities, model management, observability features (including Opik, Langfuse, and Arize Phoenix) and more, letting you quickly go from prototype to production. Here's a list of the core features: Quick start Before installing Dify, make sure your machine meets the following minimum system requirements: CPU = 2 Core RAM = 4 GiB The easiest way to start the Dify server is through Docker Compose. Before running Dify with the…
About PixelRAG
Official codebase for PIXELRAG: Web Screenshots Beat Text for Retrieval Augmented Generation Yichuan Wang , Zhifei Li , Zirui Wang , Paul Teiletche , Lesheng Jin Matei Zaharia †, Joseph E. Gonzalez †, Sewon Min † Equal contribution † Equal advising Work done at Berkeley SkyLab & BAIR & Berkeley NLP Search any document by how it looks , not just the text it contains. What it is · Give Claude eyes · How it works · Pipelines The two core operations — render a page to screenshots, search a visual index: Live, hosted endpoint — serves a pre built index of 8.28M Wikipedia pages . No setup, no API…
read the full PixelRAG overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Dify or PixelRAG more popular?
Dify has 160,251 GitHub stars and PixelRAG has 10,834. Dify has the larger community by that measure.
Are Dify and PixelRAG free?
Both are open source. Dify has no licence declared in this registry, and PixelRAG is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Dify and PixelRAG?
Dify is written in Python and PixelRAG in Python. 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 PixelRAG?
Choose Dify if you want the larger community (160,251 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose PixelRAG if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.