I went into Dify expecting another developer toy. I came out genuinely reconsidering what "enterprise-ready" means for AI tooling. The self-hosted version is free under Apache 2.0, which for regulated industries is not a small thing. We had compliance asking questions about every vendor we evaluated, and "you control the code" changes that conversation fast.
The workflow builder is better than I expected. Six months ago I would have said what it does now requires a custom build. Multi-step pipelines with branching, tool calls, human review gates, it's all there and it actually works. The RAG pipeline management is the piece I keep coming back to, our team spent a lot of time manually wrangling that before.
It's not perfect.
If you're a large org with complex access control requirements, the SSO story is passable but not polished. Self-hosting also means you own the infra, which is fine if you have the engineering capacity and annoying if you don't. And the docs have a habit of being a version or two behind the actual product, which leads to some head-scratching. But at the price point, the tradeoffs are pretty forgiving.