Good for / not for
- Technical teams prototyping retrieval and agent pipelines visually before committing them to code.
- Anyone who wants an MIT licence with no use restrictions, and no vendor plan to outgrow.
- Teams that would rather run everything on their own infrastructure, since there is no hosted option to choose.
- People who care whether a project is alive: v1.12.0 shipped on 1 September 2026 across more than 200 merged pull requests.
- Non-technical users who want a ready-made, customer-facing chat widget.
- Anyone who wants someone else to run it. Hosted Langflow Cloud was shut down on 9 April 2026 and no official paid managed tier has replaced it.
- Teams with a compliance requirement: self-hosted deployments do not carry the SOC 2 Type II compliance the discontinued cloud version had.
What it actually does
Langflow gives you a canvas and a palette of components — models, prompts, data sources, vector stores, agents — and you connect them with wires until the thing runs. The graph is the program: you can see where a document goes in, which model reads it and what comes back, and change any of it without editing code. All of it is MIT-licensed and free, and all of it runs on your infrastructure, because there is no hosted version any more. DataStax deprecated Langflow Cloud on 9 March 2026 and shut it down a month later, on 9 April. Your costs are the server you run it on and whatever your model provider charges for tokens. The project is not coasting: v1.12.0 arrived on 1 September 2026 with RBAC foundations, OpenTelemetry export, pgVector, SSO foundations and a sandboxed microVM for code execution, across more than 200 merged pull requests. The gap is operational. Observability, authentication and billing guardrails are yours to build, and teams commonly add Langfuse for tracing.
Install Langflow on your own machine or server.
Nothing for the software: MIT-licensed, no plan and no usage quota. You pay for the host, and for whatever your model provider charges per token.
From the vendor's docsPricing and free-plan limits
Free tier: Everything is free; you pay for the server you run it on and for your model provider's tokens.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Open source | Free |
There is no vendor plan. Hosted Langflow Cloud closed on 9 April 2026 and nothing paid replaced it, so your costs are hosting plus model API usage. |
Prices checked on Sep 6, 2026 against the vendor's pricing page. Plans change often — confirm before you pay.
Three honest limitations
- There is no hosted option. DataStax deprecated Langflow Cloud on 9 March 2026 and shut it down on 9 April 2026, and no official paid managed tier has replaced it.
- The open-source version leaves observability, authentication and billing guardrails for you to build; teams commonly bolt Langfuse on for tracing.
- Self-hosted deployments do not carry the SOC 2 Type II compliance the discontinued cloud version had.
Alternatives
- Dify — Choose Dify instead if you want a finished chat product with an admin interface and a hosted free tier, and can accept its licence restrictions.
- n8n — Choose n8n instead if the job is connecting business apps on a schedule rather than prototyping model pipelines.
- Activepieces — Choose Activepieces instead if you want an MIT licence and a hosted free plan you do not have to run yourself.
Getting started in 5 minutes
- Install it from the GitHub repository and run it locally; there is no account and no hosted version to sign up for.
- Build one flow end to end — a data source, a vector store, a model, an output — before adding agents.
- If you need RBAC, SSO or OpenTelemetry, read what v1.12.0 actually shipped on 1 September 2026 — the release describes RBAC and SSO as foundations.
- Plan the operational side yourself: tracing, authentication and cost controls are not included, and teams commonly add Langfuse for tracing.
- Budget for the host and for model tokens. The software itself has no price and no quota.
Langflow questions
- Is Langflow free?
- Entirely. It is MIT-licensed with no vendor plan. Your costs are the server you run it on and what your model provider charges for tokens.
- Is there a hosted version?
- Not any more. DataStax deprecated Langflow Cloud on 9 March 2026 and shut it down on 9 April 2026, and no official paid managed tier has replaced it. Self-hosting is the only way to run it.
- Who owns Langflow?
- IBM, by way of DataStax: Langflow went to DataStax in April 2024, and IBM completed its acquisition of DataStax on 1 November 2025. IBM says it will keep supporting the open-source project, which shipped v1.12.0 on 1 September 2026.
- Is it production-ready?
- The flows are; what surrounds them is not included. Observability, authentication and billing guardrails are yours to build, and self-hosted deployments do not carry the SOC 2 Type II compliance the discontinued cloud had.
- Langflow or Dify?
- Langflow if you want an MIT-licensed canvas and will run and instrument it yourself. Dify if you want a hosted free tier and an admin interface, and can accept a licence that restricts multi-tenant SaaS.
Sources
- GitHub repository (MIT, 154,354 stars, v1.12.0 on 2026-09-01)
- Langflow project site
- n8n vs Flowise vs Langflow for enterprises (observability gaps, SOC 2 Type II)
- Source code: MIT
Research-compiled, not hands-on tested. Compiled from official docs, the vendor's pricing page and community reviews as of Sep 6, 2026. We haven't tested it hands-on yet.