Dify vs Vellum
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose Dify if you want open-source platform for building llm apps and agentic workflows (Supervised agent, freemium); choose Vellum if you want platform to build, evaluate, and deploy llm apps and ai agents (Supervised agent, contact).
| Dify | Vellum | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Open-source platform for building LLM apps and agentic workflows | Platform to build, evaluate, and deploy LLM apps and AI agents |
| Type | platform | platform |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | freemium · Self-host free; Dify Cloud has a free sandbox plan | contact |
| Best for | developers, smb, mid-market | developers, enterprise |
| Deployment | self-hosted, saas, on-prem | saas, api |
| Modalities | text, api | text, code, api |
| Models | model-agnostic, open-source | model-agnostic, gpt, claude, gemini |
| Protocols | function-calling, rest-api, mcp | mcp, function-calling, rest-api |
| Integrations | OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Llama, Kubernetes, Docker | Composio, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Cursor |
| Capabilities | 4 documented | 4 documented |
Dify
- +Open source and self-hostable (Docker, Kubernetes) with no vendor lock-in
- +Combines workflows, RAG, agents, model management, and observability in one stack
- +Broad model support including any OpenAI-API-compatible endpoint
- -A building platform: you design and operate the apps and their guardrails
- -Self-hosting at scale requires infrastructure expertise
Vellum
- +Genuinely model-agnostic with a large, frequently updated catalog, avoiding lock-in
- +Covers the full LLM lifecycle (experiment, evaluate, deploy, monitor) in one place
- +Strong agent tooling with first-class MCP, Composio integrations, and auto-generated function-calling schemas
- -Brand and domain confusion: the apex vellum.ai domain appeared to host an unrelated product at this review
- -Platform pricing is not transparently published (sales-led, enterprise-leaning)
Which should you choose?
Dify is open-source platform for building llm apps and agentic workflows, best for developers, smb, mid-market. Vellum is platform to build, evaluate, and deploy llm apps and ai agents, best for developers, enterprise. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.