ComfyUI

TL;DR. ComfyUI is open-source software that builds images, video, audio, and 3D media from connected steps called nodes. Users run it free on local devices or through paid Comfy Cloud in a browser. It suits technical artists, VFX teams, studios, and developers who need repeatable pipelines. Beginners face complex setup. Community-built add-on nodes also bring security risks.

At a Glance

A solo open-source experiment became an open workflow engine for visual generative AI. A workflow engine is software that runs connected steps in order. In April 2026, Comfy announced $30 million in financing at a $500 million valuation. The company said this brought total funding to $47 million.

ComfyUI began after developer Comfyanonymous discovered Stable Diffusion in October 2022. Comfy says the developer built the tool in two weeks and open-sourced it in January 2023. Comfy's blog dates the initial commit to January 16, 2023. Comfy's 2026 financing post names Yannik Marek as ComfyUI's creator and a co-founder. TechCrunch names Yoland Yan as co-founder and CEO. Google Cloud's case study names Robin Huang as a co-founder.

ComfyUI serves creative AI and visual production. Its node graph lets users connect operations into repeatable workflows. It supports image, video, 3D, and audio generation, with local and cloud execution. Comfy reported 4 million users and more than 60,000 community-built nodes in April 2026. The latest financing followed a $17 million funding announcement in September 2025. Comfy named Pace Capital, Chemistry, Abstract Ventures, and other investors for that funding.

Craft led the 2026 financing, with participation from Pace Capital, Chemistry, and TruArrow.

Comfy's Desktop privacy policy says Comfy Organization Inc. is established in San Francisco.

Key links: Website, GitHub, Documentation, and Blog.

Founders & Leadership

Yannik Marek created ComfyUI as a solo project and open-sourced it in January 2023. Comfy Org later formed around him and contributors who built key parts of its ecosystem.

The founders’ public materials emphasize open-source development and community contributions. In January 2025, Comfy described its team as small, with alumni from Stability AI and Google. It said many team members contributed to ComfyUI before joining. It described its structure as flat. It said the team values collaboration and execution over titles. The company published no verified team-size figure, board roster, or recent executive hires in these sources.

Tags & Categories

ComfyUI centers on visual, node-based workflows for generating and editing media. Its official repository lists Stable Diffusion, Flux, and Wan 2.1 among supported models. It also supports custom nodes (add-on modules that users build) and APIs (interfaces that let other software control ComfyUI).

Primary Category: AI Design Categories: AI Design, AI Other Tags: node-based, generative-ai, image-generation, video-generation, audio-generation, 3d-generation, open-source, local-inference, custom-nodes, stable-diffusion, flux, api-integration

Best-Fit Users

ComfyUI serves solo artists and studio teams. One customer case reports 100,000+ assets across games and video. Named users include artists, technical artists, technical directors, VFX (visual effects) specialists, developers, and machine-learning enthusiasts. Documented sectors center on VFX and film, advertising, games and animation. Architectural projection and creative education also appear.

• VFX production: Artists remove objects and create mattes (masks that isolate parts of an image). They also restyle footage and upscale shots in workflows they can inspect and extend.

• Advertising: Silverside AI built ComfyUI workflows for Svedka's Super Bowl LX commercial, which aired February 8, 2026.

• Games and video: Series Entertainment uses repeatable character and background workflows across Netflix titles. Comfy's case study reports more than 100,000 generated assets.

• Experiential media: Moment Factory used ComfyUI for architectural projection-mapping concepts, visual development, and design exploration.

Comfy's examples span a single artist and large production organizations. However, published materials do not set an ideal employee count. The customer evidence is international. Comfy highlights Nanyang Technological University (NTU) student projects in Singapore and describes Comfy Cloud serving global creative teams. The strongest fit appears to be creators and teams that need adjustable workflows for repeated visual production. One-off image generation alone appears to be a weaker fit.

User Feedback & Adoption

Comfy reports 4 million users and 150,000 daily downloads. The company also reports more than 60,000 community-built nodes. Comfy published these adoption figures on April 24, 2026. These are vendor-reported numbers, not independently audited user counts. Chiri Atlas could not load the G2 listing, so G2 rating data is unverified.

G2 review themes are unverified because the listing did not load. Chiri cannot assess review sentiment or sentiment change.

User feedback on GitHub adds an operational concern. A March 2026 support report says frequent updates broke nodes and basic features in active workflows. GitHub closed that report as not planned on April 26, 2026. That report reflects an individual experience, not a measured rate of breakage. ComfyUI’s repository describes weekly releases and stable core releases roughly every two weeks. It warns that commits (individual code changes) outside stable release tags (labeled tested versions) may break custom nodes.

Comfy’s April 2026 announcement identifies Silverside AI as a ComfyUI user on SVEDKA’s 2026 Super Bowl commercial. Silverside co-founder PJ Pereira praises the technology and extension community. This is a vendor-published customer example, not an independent adoption study.

Impact & Recommendations

Comfy reports four million users and 60,000+ community-built nodes. These figures are vendor-reported. In April 2026, Comfy reported $30 million in new funding at a $500 million valuation. It said total funding reached $47 million. Named production examples include Black Math and Silverside AI, including work on SVEDKA’s 2026 Super Bowl commercial.

ComfyUI’s advantage combines graph-based workflow control, local execution, broad model support, and community-built extensions. That structure suits technical artists and studios that need reproducible pipelines, precise iteration, and integration across creative tools. InvokeAI offers a credible open-source alternative with local node workflows. It also offers a layer-based canvas (a canvas that stacks image parts as separate layers).

Its documentation says InvokeAI cannot import Comfy workflows directly because the backends (the server software that runs workflows) differ. Figma Weave overlaps in browser-based, node-based media creation, with professional editing tools and multiple AI models. Figma acquired Weavy in October 2025 and incorporated it as Figma Weave.

Midjourney competes for image creation, but its prompt-led workflow differs from ComfyUI’s more granular, modular pipeline.

Main risks include custom-node security and reliability, installation effort, and competition from more approachable creative canvases. Comfy’s docs warn that custom nodes require dependency installation. They also warn that unverified custom nodes can create security risks. The Registry adds security scans and versioning, but teams still need operational oversight.

Recommendation: shortlist ComfyUI for technical artists, VFX and advertising studios, and teams with workflow engineering capacity. Do not select it first for teams that prioritize simple, prompt-led generation and minimal setup. Comfy can grow if it delivers its funded work on cloud access, collaboration, and node stability. Those projects address problems that slow adoption. They could make more community users into long-term professional users.

Security & Compliance

ComfyUI defaults to localhost (the user's own computer only). Its custom-node ecosystem runs third-party Python code with the server’s privileges. Comfy’s security policy treats custom nodes as arbitrary code. It expects users to trust them like other installed software. Operators who expose the server beyond localhost must secure it. They must add firewalls, authentication, and reverse proxies (servers that filter traffic before it reaches ComfyUI).

The Comfy Registry prohibits eval and exec (Python functions that run text as code). It also prohibits runtime package installation through subprocess calls (commands that start other programs). It prohibits obfuscated custom-node code (code that hides its purpose). Desktop users can set Manager to Standard or Strict. Standard blocks installation from unregistered sources. Strict blocks all node-pack changes.

Comfy says its registry scans nodes for suspicious behavior. However, two malicious node packs received 790 downloads before Comfy banned them from the Registry on October 21.

ComfyUI-Manager versions before 3.38 had CVE-2025-67303. A CVE is a public identifier for a known security flaw. This flaw let remote attackers manipulate configuration through an unprotected web API. A web API is an interface that other software uses over a network. The advisory marks local-only installations as unaffected. It recommends ComfyUI 0.3.76 or later with Manager 3.38 or later.

The fix moves configuration into a protected directory and blocks external API access. The malicious node pack incident shows that registry screening does not eliminate supply-chain risk. Supply-chain risk is the risk from third-party code that users install.

Comfy Desktop’s June 3, 2026 privacy policy says analytics and crash diagnostics require opt-in consent. It says prompts, workflows, generated media, models, and local settings remain on-device and do not go to Comfy Org. Comfy reports a completed SOC 2 Type II audit for enterprise services. This audit is an independent review of security controls over time. Comfy says the report is available on request and offers SSO (single sign-on) and a DPA (data processing agreement). These statements do not show a separate SOC 2 certification for standalone ComfyUI.

Pricing & Business Model

Comfy keeps local ComfyUI free. It earns money from three sources. One source is cloud GPU time that Comfy runs on its servers. The others are production APIs and paid access to partner models. Local graph execution remains free. Credits apply to Cloud billing and optional Partner Nodes (nodes that call paid partner models).

New users receive five free GPU (graphics processor) runs.

Standard, Creator, and Pro cost $20, $35, and $100 monthly. Annual billing lowers effective prices to $16, $28, and $80 monthly. Comfy bills these plans at $192, $336, and $960 yearly. The pricing page lists Team at $700 per month, or $630 per month billed yearly ($7,560). Cloud credits pay for active GPU time and Partner Nodes.

Workflow editing consumes no GPU credits. Customers can buy top-ups (extra credits that customers buy), which remain valid for one year.

Comfy API adds servers that run workflows for production use, with prices based on use. Comfy bills GPU time by the second. Prices start at $3.49 per hour for RTX PRO 6000 (an NVIDIA GPU model). H100 (another NVIDIA GPU model) costs $6.23 per GPU hour. Comfy customizes enterprise capacity, support, and contract terms. Comfy lists no public enterprise price.

Comfy reported $30 million in new financing at a $500 million valuation in April 2026. This financing brought total funding to $47 million. These financing details indicate growth investment, not revenue performance. The reviewed materials contain no Comfy revenue or ARR (annual recurring revenue) figures. They also contain no total addressable market (the total possible revenue for a product) estimate.

What It Offers

ComfyUI builds generative-media workflows as connected node graphs, with editable steps for image, video, audio, and 3D outputs. Users run it locally or use hosted Comfy Cloud in a browser. Each node performs a task. Links pass data between nodes. Comfy says its ecosystem includes 5,000+ community extensions and 60,000+ nodes, with integrations for Photoshop, Nuke, Blender, and Houdini.

Comfy Desktop manages multiple local ComfyUI installations side by side. It includes snapshots (saved copies of an installation state) and model downloads. Desktop supports Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Comfy Cloud offers five free GPU runs for new users, then credit-based Standard, Creator, and Pro plans. Monthly billing costs $20, $35, and $100. Annual billing lowers these to $16, $28, and $80 per month. Plans charge credits for active GPU time and Partner Nodes, not workflow editing.

Creator and higher plans support importing user models. Pro allows workflows up to one hour.

Developers can use Comfy API v2 and official Python and TypeScript SDKs (software development kits, or code libraries). These tools submit workflows, track jobs, and retrieve outputs. Comfy API deployments provide managed workflow endpoints (network addresses that run workflows). Comfy bills GPU time by the second. The Comfy Registry supplies custom nodes to ComfyUI-Manager. ComfyUI-Manager installs and updates extensions, manages models, saves snapshots, and finds missing nodes.

In March 2026, Comfy introduced four tools for sharing workflows. App Mode hides the node graph and shows only the inputs a user needs. App Builder sets up that simple app view. Shareable app URLs let other people open the app through a link. ComfyHub is a place to publish workflows.

In October 2026, Comfy launched Comfy Agent in Cloud beta. Comfy Agent builds, runs, and changes workflows again and again from user descriptions.

Chiri Analysis

Chiri Score: 73/100

Verdict

Best for:

• Technical artists and technical directors building reproducible generative pipelines

• VFX studios doing object removal, matte creation, restyling, and upscaling

• Advertising, games, and animation teams producing assets at volume

• Developers who need a local API or managed workflow endpoints

• Users who require free, local, on-device generation

Not for:

• Beginners who want prompt-only generation with no setup

• Teams without staff to review and maintain custom nodes

• Organizations unable to secure servers exposed beyond localhost (the user's own computer)

• Teams that cannot fix failures caused by frequent extension updates

Head-to-head

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does ComfyUI cost?

Running ComfyUI locally is free. Comfy Cloud Standard, Creator, and Pro cost $20, $35, and $100 per month. Annual billing lowers these to $16, $28, and $80 per month. New users get five free Cloud GPU runs. Credits pay for Cloud GPU time and optional Partner Nodes. The pricing page lists Team at $700 per month, or $630 per month billed yearly ($7,560).

Is ComfyUI SOC 2 compliant?

Comfy reports a completed SOC 2 Type II audit for its enterprise services. SOC 2 Type II is an independent audit of security controls over time. Comfy provides the report on request. Chiri Atlas could not independently verify this claim. The audit does not show that self-hosted ComfyUI software has its own certification.

Is ComfyUI safe to use?

ComfyUI binds to localhost (127.0.0.1) by default, which limits network exposure. Custom nodes are add-on modules that run arbitrary Python code. Comfy's policy says users must trust them like installed software. Two malicious node packs reached 790 downloads before the Registry banned them. Operators must add firewalls, reverse proxies, and authentication for exposed deployments.

Is ComfyUI good for enterprise use?

ComfyUI fits enterprises with workflow-engineering capacity and security oversight. Comfy reports enterprise SSO, a DPA, and custom contracts. Enterprise pricing is not public. Desktop Manager Strict mode blocks all node-pack changes for governance. Teams without technical staff will find setup and extension maintenance demanding.

Who are ComfyUI's main competitors?

InvokeAI is the closest open-source rival, with local node workflows and a layer-based canvas. Figma Weave competes in browser-based, node-based media creation. Midjourney competes for image generation through a simpler prompt-led workflow. ComfyUI workflows cannot import directly into InvokeAI because the backends differ.

Can ComfyUI run locally?

Yes. ComfyUI is open source and runs on a local device. Comfy Desktop has Windows, macOS, and Linux builds. It manages multiple installations, snapshots, and model downloads. Comfy's Desktop privacy policy says prompts, workflows, and outputs stay on-device.

What models does ComfyUI support?

The official repository lists Stable Diffusion, Flux, and Wan 2.1 among supported models. ComfyUI also supports custom nodes and API integration. Comfy reports 60,000+ community-built nodes. It names Photoshop, Nuke, Blender, and Houdini as integrations.

Who created ComfyUI?

Yannik Marek, known as comfyanonymous, created ComfyUI as a solo project in Quebec City. He open-sourced it in January 2023. He later left Stability AI to form Comfy Org with core contributors. TechCrunch names Yoland Yan as co-founder and CEO.

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Reviewed by Chiri Atlas Research Desk (AI Tooling Analyst) on 2026-10-25.

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Research sources

• https://blog.comfy.org/p/comfy-agent-the-first-agent-for-craft

• https://blog.comfy.org/p/comfy-raises-17m-funding

• https://blog.comfy.org/p/comfyui-raises-30m-to-scale-open

• https://blog.comfy.org/p/comfyui-turns-2-a-journey-and-call

• https://blog.comfy.org/p/from-workflow-to-app-introducing

• https://blog.comfy.org/p/upscaler-4k-malicious-node-pack-post

• https://blog.comfyui.ca/comfyui/update/2024/06/18/Next-Chapter.html

• https://cloud.google.com/customers/comfyui

• https://comfy-ui.org/team/

• https://comfy.org/about/

• https://comfy.org/cloud/

• https://comfy.org/contact/

• https://comfy.org/customers/

• https://comfy.org/customers/moment-factory/

• https://comfy.org/customers/series-entertainment/

• https://comfy.org/customers/svedka-silverside/

• https://comfy.org/customers/videos/black-math/

• https://comfy.org/download/

• https://comfy.org/enterprise/

• https://comfy.org/platform/comfy-api/

• https://comfy.org/pricing/

• https://comfy.org/privacy/desktop/

• https://comfy.org/solutions/vfx/

• https://comfy.org/workflows/use-cases/

• https://docs.comfy.org/basic-concepts/workflow

• https://docs.comfy.org/development/api-development/sdks

• https://docs.comfy.org/development/overview

• https://docs.comfy.org/installation/desktop/faq

• https://docs.comfy.org/installation/desktop/usage/manage

• https://docs.comfy.org/installation/install_custom_node

• https://docs.comfy.org/interface/credits

• https://docs.comfy.org/manager/overview

• https://docs.comfy.org/registry/overview

• https://docs.comfy.org/registry/standards

• https://docs.comfy.org/tutorials/partner-nodes/overview

• https://github.com/Comfy-Org/ComfyUI/issues/12985

• https://github.com/Comfy-Org/ComfyUI/security/policy

• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-95pq-hr8p-f5g7

• https://github.com/comfy-org/comfyui

• https://invoke.ai/

• https://invoke.ai/features/workflows/comfyui-migration/

• https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/24/comfyui-hits-500m-valuation-as-creators-seek-more-control-over-ai-generated-media/

• https://tracxn.com/d/companies/comfy/__LucdP_H74QeuMgwthELX9dllM957ntvuLr46WNrY3gU

• https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/comfy-4ed9

• https://www.figma.com/blog/welcome-weavy-to-figma/

• https://www.g2.com/products/comfyui/reviews

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/yolandyan

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yolandyan_super-excited-for-the-new-chapter-of-our-activity-7209274406831890434-8PtF