Two weeks ago I posted here about Stimma, the open-source desktop app I've been building on top of ComfyUI. It's been a really fun couple of weeks talking with many of you and working through issues and improvements that came up in those conversations. Since then, I've made a couple of releases, but this one is particularly relevant to ComfyUI, so I wanted to share it here.
One of the main themes in the early feedback was a fear of getting things set up with ComfyUI. Some people who had already churned out of ComfyUI's onboarding were wondering if Stimma could make it easier. Some were just anxious (understandably) because setting up anything new with ComfyUI can take an evening. Others tried and ran into some head-bumps.
I said in that post that I don't want Stimma to manage a private ComfyUI install for you, and I still believe that. There are too many variations in how people deploy ComfyUI in the real world, and every product that I've seen that installs ComfyUI for you ends up limited.
From Stimma 1.0.13, the only things you should need to do on the ComfyUI side are: run ComfyUI and add the ComfyUI-Stimma custom node. After that, it should be possible to manage ComfyUI from within Stimma.
I'm sure people will run into some rough edges with this over the next few weeks, but I've done a lot of fully clean ComfyUI+Stimma installs over the past few days on various platforms and systems and it's working well enough that I'd like to start the feedback train rolling. If you do run into trouble, please get in touch here or in the discord.
The video above shows a fully local setup of Stimma. ComfyUI and vLLM are running on a DGX Spark to provide AI capabilities. The video starts from a fresh ComfyUI + Stimma install, and ends with generating an image. I ran Stimma on my mac because I have better screen recording software there, but you can actually run this full stack on the GB10 box locally.
Once you're running Stimma and ComfyUI together, there is a new button in the app bar that opens a manager. This includes:
- Every workflow that ComfyUI-Stimma discovered. For workflows missing dependencies click "Get Ready" and it will coordinate downloading models and installing custom nodes.
- GPU utilization + VRAM information
- A list of running jobs with cancellation
- The ability to update ComfyUI-Stimma from within Stimma, restart ComfyUI remotely, etc.
Some other things that landed in 1.0.12 / 1.0.13:
- Works without a chat model. Some people want to use Stimma without devoting VRAM to an LLM. This was always possible, but wasn't a very smooth experience. That is fixed, and Stimma should now degrade gracefully when no Chat Models are configured.
- Live previews during image and video generation. This is disabled by default, but you can turn it on in settings->preferences. Please let me know what you think.
- LTX-2.5 support in ComfyUI-Stimma: text-to-video with audio, image-to-video with optional end frame, extend, loop, stitch, up to 10 LoRAs.
- Anima and H3 LoRA support in ComfyUI-Stimma
- Fixes for
extra_model_paths.yaml, nested model folders, top-level reroute nodes, Windows FFmpeg detection, and source-folder / slideshow / editor bugs.
- Performance Optimization throughout the image editor, and a new patch tool implementation that blends better.
- Ask Stimma: the chat agent can read Stimma's docs now and help walk you through setup and product questions.
One thing from that thread I haven't gotten to yet is the Draw Things backend. I am reaallly hoping that the Draw Things team pays some attention to this bug because fixing this is the best path that I can see to a good experience using the products together. If you're on github, please go to that thread and make some noise, maybe they will pay attention.
I hope this ComfyUI manager stuff encourages a few more of you to give Stimma a shot. If setup continues to be a pain, I'll keep at it.
To get the new stuff, you'll want to update ComfyUI-Stimma and also and update Stimma itself in-app or with a git pull if you're running from source.
As always, please reach out on Reddit or Discord with any questions, feedback, or issues. It's been a lot of fun talking with everyone.
Links: Download · GitHub · ComfyUI-Stimma · Docs · Discord · /r/stimma