🧩 ComfyUI vs Automatic1111 in 2026: Which UI Wins?

I still have a stable-diffusion-webui folder sitting on my rig. I haven't opened it since spring. Not out of loyalty-switching drama — I just checked the GitHub API before writing this, and AUTOMATIC1111's last tagged release is v1.10.1, dated February 9, 2025. Eighteen months of "coming soon" on Flux support while ComfyUI shipped five point-releases in the two weeks I was drafting this article. That's not a vibe, that's a pushed_at timestamp.

I run both installs on a 16GB RTX 4080 (Studio driver, Windows 11), and I'm not going to pretend this is a close fight anymore. It was closer in 2024. Here's what the actual repo data says, plus where A1111 — or more accurately, its successor forks — still earns a place on a drive.

By the numbers#

Pulled straight from each project's GitHub API on the day I'm writing this, not from an aggregator's summary table:

• AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui: 164,485 stars, last tagged release v1.10.1 (Feb 9, 2025), 2,502 open issues, AGPL-3.0
• comfyanonymous/ComfyUI: 126,867 stars, last release v0.32.0 (Aug 11, 2026), 4,536 open issues, GPL-3.0
• ComfyUI's release cadence over the two weeks before writing: v0.29.0 (Jul 29) → v0.29.2 (Jul 31) → v0.30.0 (Aug 3) → v0.31.0 (Aug 8) → v0.32.0 (Aug 11) — a new version roughly every 2-3 days
• Comfy Org (the company behind ComfyUI) raised $30M at a $500M valuation in April 2026, led by Craft, bringing total funding to $47M — per the company's own blog post and TechCrunch's coverage of the round
• Comfy Org's own numbers from that announcement: 4 million users, 60,000+ community-built nodes, 150,000+ daily downloads

A1111 still out-stars ComfyUI — first-mover advantage from 2022 dies hard — but stars measure history, not activity. The releases feed measures activity, and there's no honest way to read that gap as anything but one project shipping and one project idling.

Head to head#

The node graph earns its learning curve#

A1111 gives you a Generate button and hides the pipeline. ComfyUI makes you build the pipeline, node by node — load checkpoint, CLIP text encode, KSampler, VAE decode, save image. That first hour is genuinely more work than clicking through A1111's tabs, and I won't pretend otherwise; every complaint about ComfyUI's UX is fair for hour one.

What it buys you shows up in hour ten. Once you've built a txt2img-to-upscale-to-facedetail chain, that's a graph you save, reuse, and modify by dragging one new node into an existing wire instead of hunting through nested tabs for the right checkbox. My working ComfyUI setup is a handful of saved graphs I load and swap checkpoints in — not something I rebuild from memory every session.

Reproducibility is the actual gap#

This is the one that changed my mind for good. Every image ComfyUI saves carries its full workflow embedded in the PNG metadata — drag that file back into ComfyUI and the entire node graph reconstructs itself, checkpoint names, sampler settings, seed, every wire. Hand that PNG to someone else and they're running your exact pipeline in one drag-and-drop.

A1111 embeds a parameters string too, but it's a flat list of settings for a single generate call — no branching, no multi-stage pipeline, nothing to reconstruct beyond "these were the sliders." If your workflow is one model and one pass, that's fine. The moment you're chaining stages — which is most real production work — A1111 gives you a settings note, and ComfyUI gives you the actual machine.

New-model support: this is where it's not close#

Flux launched in August 2024. AUTOMATIC1111's own GitHub discussions still have an unresolved thread from that same month with a title asking, bluntly, whether the project should be considered abandoned over the lack of support. It never got a maintainer reply in that thread. ComfyUI had Flux running within days, through its normal node system.

That pattern held through 2026. ComfyUI's release notes show MiniMax-H3 VAE support and a Wan-Animate2 implementation landing within days of those models shipping in early August — I checked the actual release changelogs, not a summary of them. A1111 hasn't tagged a release since before most of 2026's model families existed. If a UI's whole job is giving you access to whatever checkpoint dropped this week, one of these two is doing that job and one stopped.

Where A1111's family still wins — through its forks#

Stock AUTOMATIC1111 isn't the honest comparison anymore for anyone who wants that tab-based layout current. That's Forge Neo. lllyasviel's original Forge kept A1111's UI on a faster backend and was the right pick through 2024 — then the original Forge repo went quiet after July 31, 2025. The community continuation, Forge Neo, picked it up and is actively adding Flux, Qwen-Image, Wan and Z-Image support through 2026.

So the real decision tree isn't "ComfyUI vs A1111" anymore — it's "node graph vs a maintained A1111-shaped fork." If you specifically hate node graphs and want the classic layout with current models, Forge Neo is worth a look. Plain AUTOMATIC1111, unmodified, isn't in that conversation.

Extension ecosystems#

A1111's extension library is bigger by raw count — years of head start does that — but a meaningful share of it hasn't been touched since the maintainer's activity dropped, and extensions built against an app that stopped shipping have nowhere new to go. ComfyUI's 60,000+ community nodes (Comfy Org's own count from the April funding announcement) skew newer because the platform itself is newer, and critically, they keep getting updated against a base that's still moving — new nodes ship the same week a new model does, because that's the entire point of the node system.

Decision table#

Pros and cons#

ComfyUI

• Ships new-model support within days, backed by a funded team and 60,000+ active community nodes
• Full pipeline reproducibility baked into every output file
• Official desktop installer now handles most of the old setup pain
• Steeper first-hour learning curve; a blank canvas is intimidating

AUTOMATIC1111 / Forge Neo

• Gentler first hour — a Generate button beats a blank node graph for absolute beginners
• Massive legacy extension library for SD1.5/SDXL-era workflows
• Stock A1111 hasn't tagged a release since Feb 2025 — Forge Neo is the version actually worth installing
• No official desktop installer; setup is scripts and manual dependency management

How I checked this#

I pulled stargazer counts, release tags, publish dates and open-issue counts directly from each project's GitHub API rather than trusting a comparison site's summary table — every number above traces to api.github.com/repos/... for both projects, checked the day I wrote this. The funding figures come from Comfy Org's own blog post and TechCrunch's reporting on the same round, not a secondary aggregator. I didn't run a formal it/s or VRAM-delta benchmark between the two apps for this piece — you'll see pages claiming ComfyUI is some fixed percentage faster or lighter on VRAM, and I'm not repeating a number I didn't measure myself. What I can tell you from actually using both on the same 4080: neither one is VRAM-bound differently enough at SDXL scale to matter for a 16GB card; Flux is where things get tight, and that's true regardless of which UI is asking your GPU to load it — assuming your UI can load it at all, which for stock A1111 it currently can't.

What I run#

ComfyUI, daily, for anything that touches a 2025-or-newer checkpoint — it's the same install that renders our local video workflows in the best local AI tools roundup. The A1111 folder stays on the drive as a museum piece for a couple of old SDXL LoRA workflows I never rebuilt, and I'd rather spend that rebuild time than keep pretending stock A1111 is a going concern. If you're VRAM-limited and want to try both before committing to hardware, renting a card by the hour is cheaper than guessing — our local vs. cloud AI comparison walks through when that math works, and RTX 3090 vs RTX 4060 Ti is the used-card matchup I get asked about most once people are ready to buy.

Official resources#

• ComfyUI on GitHub — source, releases, and install instructions
• AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui on GitHub — source and release history
• Forge Neo — the actively maintained Forge continuation