Dify vs Microsoft Agent Framework

Dify is an open-source platform for building AI applications with agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, model management, observability, and tools. Workflow Studio provides a visual canvas for model calls, knowledge retrieval, tools, code, branching, triggers, and human review. Workflows can start from user input, API calls, schedules, webhooks, plugin events, or uploaded payloads. Knowledge Pipeline turns files, online documents, drives, crawlers, and web content into searchable knowledge bases with metadata and citations. Retrieval supports semantic, keyword, hybrid, and reranked methods with metadata filters. Applications can be published as hosted web apps, website embeds, API endpoints, or MCP servers. Dify connects to providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and xAI, while its Marketplace lists more than 200 tools. Community Edition is self-hostable with Docker; Enterprise can run in a customer VPC, on-premises, or an air-gapped network. Sandbox and Community are free. Professional costs $590 a year per workspace; Team costs $1,590 a year per workspace.

Microsoft Agent Framework has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.