What is SwarmUI

SwarmUI is a new graphical interface that uses ComfyUI as a backend. It gives you different ways of working, where you can use a conventional interface to create images, or you can use ComfyUI, with all of its nodes and functions, if you want to dive into more technical detail. It's even great for creating simplified interfaces to control complex ComfyUI workflows.

The Generate tab gives you a linear interface, almost like the experience you would have using Forge WebUI or Automatic1111, letting you create and edit images without creating or connecting any nodes. You can choose a model (including Flux, SD3.5, SDXL, SD1.5), enter your prompts, adjust settings, and generate.

Swarm is really fast. It seems to give me about the best performance I've seen on my computer, including Flux.1-Dev generations that are faster than in Forge WebUI.

You can also import images as the basis for img2img operations, assigned ControlNet images to guide your generations, assign LoRAs for specific styles, upscale and refine images, create Stable Video Diffusion animations, and many more operations.

The Comfy Workflow tab is ComfyUI. All of ComfyUI, with every feature, works in this tab of SwarmUI. You could load all your Comfy workflows, start a new workflow from scratch, or click "Import from Generate tab" and let Swarm create a node-based workflow that does whatever you just did in the Generate tab.

If you want to make a new, simplified interface for a favorite Comfy workflow, SwarmUI has a powerful system for that. Working in the Comfy Workflow tab, add SwarmUI input nodes to the variables that you want displayed, choose what order they will be displayed in, label them, set default values, and organize them into groups. When you use SwarmUI's Save Workflow button (with the "Enable in Simple Tab" option checked), your workflow gets added to the Simple tab.

The Simple tab gives you a faster, simpler way to use any Comfy workflow that you've setup for it. You can just paste in an image, optionally edit prompts and other settings that you chose for it, and have a quick, simple way of doing whatever a Comfy Workflow can do. It's even a good place to package your workflows for coworkers, so they don't need to see or edit the connections in a full node-based interface.

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 will even install a model for you, if you want it to.

If you already have ComfyUI installed on your computer, and want to make sure all your models and custom nodes will still be available from within SwarmUI, try a custom installation with the "Skip Backend Install/Choose later" option. Then, 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.

If you want an interface that's a fast, efficient way to use all the latest models, including Flux, then Swarm is probably the best place to start. If you were planning to learn ComfyUI anyway, installing SwarmUI gives you a more complete package, including Comfy plus the easy-to-use Generate tab, making it a solid choice whether you want to do advanced work with nodes or not.