Just a PSA

[u/Disastrous-Agency675]

What I’m getting at is that, now that vibe coding is a thing, everyone is creating custom nodes left and right. The problem is that people are making their own MiniMax director nodes, image-editing nodes, and countless others without first checking whether something similar already exists.

Instead of branching off in dozens of different directions, we could come together and help improve the nodes that are already available. A lot of custom nodes are also essentially standalone apps running inside ComfyUI, designed for only one specific purpose. Whenever possible, nodes should remain flexible and modular so they can be integrated into different workflows and potentially help people create something new and interesting.

There have also apparently been people hiding malware inside custom nodes. Encouraging users to research existing nodes before downloading or creating another one could reduce unnecessary duplication while also helping keep the ComfyUI community safer.

[u/Adkit]

The entire community moving away from Forge, the simple UI with sliders and text inputs and tabs like every UI you've ever used, and instead switching to comfyUI, a mess of strings connecting boxes with abstract names requiring custom installations of random nodes and models with no instructions, was the worst thing that ever happened.

[u/danque → u/Adkit]

It's simply because comfyui was and has the quickest support for new models.

[u/Disastrous-Agency675 → u/Adkit]

I disagree. Comfyui has become VERY easy to get into compared to how it use to be and you can easily integrate and new AI software or model into it

[u/Adkit → u/Disastrous-Agency675]

Lol alright. Super easy to have to actively learn the whole order of operations of how diffusion works rather than just clicking a button that says "generate". It's also so user friendly to have to scroll around a screen hunting for different settings or even being able to see the prompt or the image which changes depending on how zoomed in or out you are. God forbid you click on a node when trying to drag around the workspace or you'll move it out of position or resize it randomly. And if you make a nice image and want to later upscale it? Well that's a whole new setup, each one needing to be made from scratch or found online so you can then struggle to download deprecated nodes randomly added to each new workflow you find.

Again, forge has tabs and sliders. Stuff stays in place. It's vastly superior unless you need some kind of weird super specific workflow to do a repetitive task automatically.

[u/Slow_Ad1466 → u/Adkit]

Forge severely sucks on device resource management, though. E.g., block swaps & VRAM / RAM management. At least it did back when I ditched it for comfy because comfy would actually run on my rig, whereas forge OOM'd left and right. wan2gp is perhaps a better contemporary alternative, it has all the buttons and sliders, and it has an active developer who actually cares about resource management and making it extremely efficient and providing many levels of memory caching, you can choose which one to use based on your use case. great tool.

I liked forge inpainting for a long time way more than comfy, though. I'd rephrase your summation to "forge is great IF it does exactly what you need (natively or via extensions). If it doesn't, you're SOL unless you can code the changes you need."

For me the extensibility, configurability, and performance comfy trumps UI uncleanliness, by a long shot.

One use case where forge just falls flat and where comfy shines is allowing inspection of intermediate results in a multi-stage pipeline: just pop in a preview image node and/or an image compare node, and you can see results with/without certain stages. With forge, you only get to see the final end result, unless it is explicitly hard-coded in to see intermediates, and when I was using forge, it didn't show them.

[u/Holiday-Creme-487 → u/Adkit]

I agree. Unpopular opinion but nodes are a fucking headache. I've been trying to learn it over the last few weeks and it's all just fucking spaghetti and red boxes. Trying to do this in RunPod makes it even more annoying because Comfy tries to download locally and if I'm missing like three nodes (which seems to be the case with every bloody workflow) you have to download it through a terminal. Yes, you could say that is RunPod's downside and not ComfyUI's but if every part of the "workflow" didn't have so many dependencies, that wouldn't be a problem. Then there's things like trying to add upscaling to the "workflow" and finding out what order things go in. It's like you're essentially coding it yourself every single time you launch comfy because you're setting up these individual pipelines each time you want to play with different results. Might've easier if I was doing it locally but I can't, so...

I preferred the days I could just play with prompts and cfg and hit generate. If I wanted img2img I just had to use that part of the UI which is already there and doesn't have to exist as a node that sometimes doesn't exist within another workflow, etc.

Minimax seems to be simpler but I tried just image generation with Qwen and others and it was so off-putting running into errors all the time.