What is SwarmUI

SwarmUI is a new graphical interface that uses ComfyUI as a backend. It gives you two 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.

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, 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.

Once you have a customized workflow, there is also a button labelled "Use This Workflow in Generate Tab" that changes the Generate tab's options. Instead of all the default options, the Generate tab will only have a few basic parameters to change at the top. If the "advanced" box is checked, then all of the nodes, and every parameter from each node in your custom workflow, will be available for adjustment.

While SwarmUI is tremendously powerful for a package that's still in beta, there's no option yet to design a simplified interface to a Comfy workflow. (Although you're allowed to write extensions to Swarm, there's no easy interface letting you pick the most important options and parameters from a Comfy workflow and expose an interface with just those at the top.)

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.