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Screenshot from the Generate tab in SwarmUI.
SwarmUI (known during early development as Stable Swarm) is a new interface that can serve as a wrapper for ComfyUI. In other words, you get all of ComfyUI, with all of its nodes and functions, plus a simpler interface to get started with, that doesn't require you to touch any nodes in order to create an image. Currently it's still in Beta, but don't let that stop you. It's already a promising new interface to delivers quick, efficient performance with a wide range of models.
There are installation instructions on SwarmUI's GitHub page. If you'd like to follow along with a video, you can watch this video on YouTube. The installer is very complete, it will download and install everything it needs, and will even install a model for you, if you want it to.
After you install it, if you are eager to use Stable Diffusion 3, you can follow these instructions on downloading Stable Diffusion 3 and using it in Swarm. But whether or not you use Stable Diffusion 3, SwarmUI seems like great software to use with many models.
If you already happen to have ComfyUI installed on your computer, and want to make sure all your models and custom nodes will still be available from within SwarmUI, then try a custom installation with the "Skip Backend Install/Choose later" option. Inside Swarm, give the Server>Backends tab the path to your ComfyUI start script (the one ending in main.py, not the .bat file.) To use the models already installed with Comfy, put the full paths to your models into the Server Configuration tab.
The Generate tab of the interface lets you generate images without creating or connecting any nodes. It's almost like the experience you would have using Fooocus or Automatic1111. You can choose a model (from SD1.5, SDXL, or SD3 models), type your positive and negative prompts, adjust settings, and generate images.
Overall generation is really fast. SwarmUI seems to give me about the best performance I've seen on my computer.
You can also import an image as the basis for img2img operations. It doesn't seem to support pasting images yet. (I frequently select an image or a part of an image, copy it from a paint program, and paste it directly into ComfyUI. This works in the Comfy Workflow tab, but not in the Generate tab, where images need to be loaded as separate files.)
The Generate tab has some clever prompt syntax tricks available, if you type the < symbol in your prompt for a menu. There's also an image editor that allows you to edit images or edit masks for images. There's even Animation support. It's just support for Stable Video Diffusion (you'd have to use the Comfy Workflow tab to use AnimateDiff) but it's right there, ready to make a short random animation starting with any init image you upload or any image you generate based on a prompt.
The Comfy Workflow tab is ComfyUI. All of ComfyUI, with every feature, works in this tab of SwarmUI. You could load one of your previous Comfy workflows, or start a new workflow from scratch, and completely forget that this instance of ComfyUI exists within one tab of a larger interface.
But this ComfyUI is integrated with Swarm's Generate tab as well. There are some buttons in the upper left, including one labelled "Import from Generate tab." It will take whatever you had just done in Generate and express it as ComfyUI nodes.
There is also a button labelled "Use This Workflow in Generate Tab." Press it and go back to the Generate tab and the Generate tab's options change, so that instead of all the default options, there are only a few basic parameters to change. If the "advanced" box is checked, then all of the nodes and every parameter from each node will be available for adjustment. (When writing this review, I didn't see any option to select a simplified list of the most important parameters to expose in the Generate tab.)
If you want to turn the Generate tab back to its default, full-featured menu of options, go into the Comfy Workflow tab again and press the button "Remove Workflow From Generate Tab."
The interface has places for preset workflows to be loaded. This Beta didn't come with libraries of presets, but I can imagine when it comes out of Beta that a useful list of ready-to-go preset workflows will add a lot of value.
If you were planning to install and start learning to use ComfyUI anyway, there's no real reason you couldn't install this beta of SwarmUI instead and start using it as your main ComfyUI interface. You still get the full experience of ComfyUI either way, and it would only add to your experience to have the easy-to-use Generate tab available to you whenever you wanted it.
Copyright © 2024 by Jeremy Birn
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