u/stimma

Two weeks ago I posted here about Stimma, the open-source desktop app I've been building on top of ComfyUI. It's been a really fun couple of weeks talking with many of you and working through issues and improvements that came up in those conversations. Since then, I've made a couple of releases, but this one is particularly relevant to ComfyUI, so I wanted to share it here.

One of the main themes in the early feedback was a fear of getting things set up with ComfyUI. Some people who had already churned out of ComfyUI's onboarding were wondering if Stimma could make it easier. Some were just anxious (understandably) because setting up anything new with ComfyUI can take an evening. Others tried and ran into some head-bumps.

I said in that post that I don't want Stimma to manage a private ComfyUI install for you, and I still believe that. There are too many variations in how people deploy ComfyUI in the real world, and every product that I've seen that installs ComfyUI for you ends up limited.

From Stimma 1.0.13, the only things you should need to do on the ComfyUI side are: run ComfyUI and add the ComfyUI-Stimma custom node. After that, it should be possible to manage ComfyUI from within Stimma.

I'm sure people will run into some rough edges with this over the next few weeks, but I've done a lot of fully clean ComfyUI+Stimma installs over the past few days on various platforms and systems and it's working well enough that I'd like to start the feedback train rolling. If you do run into trouble, please get in touch here or in the discord.

The video above shows a fully local setup of Stimma. ComfyUI and vLLM are running on a DGX Spark to provide AI capabilities. The video starts from a fresh ComfyUI + Stimma install, and ends with generating an image. I ran Stimma on my mac because I have better screen recording software there, but you can actually run this full stack on the GB10 box locally.

Once you're running Stimma and ComfyUI together, there is a new button in the app bar that opens a manager. This includes:

• Every workflow that ComfyUI-Stimma discovered. For workflows missing dependencies click "Get Ready" and it will coordinate downloading models and installing custom nodes.
• GPU utilization + VRAM information
• A list of running jobs with cancellation
• The ability to update ComfyUI-Stimma from within Stimma, restart ComfyUI remotely, etc.

Some other things that landed in 1.0.12 / 1.0.13:

• Works without a chat model. Some people want to use Stimma without devoting VRAM to an LLM. This was always possible, but wasn't a very smooth experience. That is fixed, and Stimma should now degrade gracefully when no Chat Models are configured.
• Live previews during image and video generation. This is disabled by default, but you can turn it on in settings->preferences. Please let me know what you think.
• LTX-2.5 support in ComfyUI-Stimma: text-to-video with audio, image-to-video with optional end frame, extend, loop, stitch, up to 10 LoRAs.
• Anima and H3 LoRA support in ComfyUI-Stimma
• Fixes for extra_model_paths.yaml, nested model folders, top-level reroute nodes, Windows FFmpeg detection, and source-folder / slideshow / editor bugs.
• Performance Optimization throughout the image editor, and a new patch tool implementation that blends better.
• Ask Stimma: the chat agent can read Stimma's docs now and help walk you through setup and product questions.

One thing from that thread I haven't gotten to yet is the Draw Things backend. I am reaallly hoping that the Draw Things team pays some attention to this bug because fixing this is the best path that I can see to a good experience using the products together. If you're on github, please go to that thread and make some noise, maybe they will pay attention.

I hope this ComfyUI manager stuff encourages a few more of you to give Stimma a shot. If setup continues to be a pain, I'll keep at it.

To get the new stuff, you'll want to update ComfyUI-Stimma and also and update Stimma itself in-app or with a git pull if you're running from source.

As always, please reach out on Reddit or Discord with any questions, feedback, or issues. It's been a lot of fun talking with everyone.

Links: Download · GitHub · ComfyUI-Stimma · Docs · Discord · /r/stimma

For the past year, I've been working on an open source desktop app called Stimma, and it's gotten to the point where it is my main user interface for driving ComfyUI (and more).

I've become increasingly reliant on coding agents in my professional life, and my tolerance for inefficient user interfaces has dropped to nearly zero. I wanted a better way to work with media, where, just like when coding, I could choose when to let an agent handle the drudgery, and when to take the reins myself.

I've been using ComfyUI since early 2023. It's a great inference engine, but at some point my bottlenecks changed. In the beginning, just getting any result at all out of the latest models was interesting. Today, it's more about managing a growing body of work — thousands of files generated across several years and many model generations, plus reference imagery, training data, preparing datasets for LoRA training, working in batch, pushing media through five different workflows applying taste and judgement along the way. Nodes and noodles are great for building a workflow, but I spend most of my time doing just about everything else.

For a while I got by with a hodgepodge of scripts and short-lived web tools driving ComfyUI, but the pain points piled up:

My media folders had devolved into tens of thousands of ComfyUI_00473.png, and I had no real way to understand how media touched by multiple workflows had been made, or how to find things. In Stimma, media is indexed using CLIP + AuraFace embeddings, and can be organized using tags, boards, projects, prompt/text search, saved views, and a Lightroom-style browser.

I like to distribute work across the 10 or so GPUs in the r/localllama opium den in my basement, and ComfyUI just doesn't make that easy. I used SwarmUI for a bit, but it had its own clunkiness and wasn't evolving as quickly as I needed it to. Stimma includes a custom node pack for ComfyUI that enables you to turn any ComfyUI workflow into a Stimma-facing tool with a nice interface for humans and agents, and that extension supports load-balancing across multiple ComfyUI instances.

AI has not solved the taste problem. Making good finished work often requires manually shuttling multiple assets through 6-8 workflows with side-quests to Photoshop along the way, and the pipeline isn't fixed--each decision about what's next requires human input. By reducing friction around these handoffs, I think people are more likely to do those steps and will make higher quality work.

In ComfyUI, creature comforts are part of the workflow--and all workflows are not created equal. Whether that means translating your prompts to Chinese for Qwen, to JSON for Ideogram, expanding simple prompts into more detailed prompts, wildcards, or input image preprocessing. That stuff really belongs in the user interface where it can become part of your muscle memory and routine, not implemented differently in each workflow.

What I'm most excited about, though, is the new stuff. Stimma includes a built-in non-destructive image editor sort of like a more AI-forward version of Lightroom's "Develop" feature for touching up images. It also includes a chat-window interface that can operate most of the product agentically, bringing some of the magic of coding agents to the media production world. This can be used to orchestrate media production but also enables Stimma to work iteratively on text based formats--HTML layouts, SVG, or to build parameter grids to analyze just about any topic.

Stimma accesses generation tools through Stimma Tools Protocol, which is sort of like MCP for media tools. This protocol is fully open with documentation, reference implementations for several languages, a CLI, as well as a ComfyUI extension that implements STP on top of ComfyUI, which is how I use it 99% of the time. This includes 30 or so Stimma-adapted ComfyUI workflows covering popular models across 10+ tasks.

Stimma is open source, local-first, and runs on the macOS/Windows/Linux machine that you sit in front of--not necessarily the one that houses your GPU(s). It doesn't require an account and can operate fully offline.

I did build an optional pay-as-you-go cloud for closed models, mostly so friends without GPUs could play, but my main objective is to turn Stimma into a meaningful part of the open source ecosystem--re-selling inference is not really that interesting to me. I use Stimma almost 100% locally and expect most of the people here would too.

Stimma's current strong suit is image generation, but it supports video, music, tts, sfx, svg, layouts and other use cases as well, and they will all mature over time.

Anyways, there's a lot here, and I honestly waited way too long to release this, but I'm excited to finally share it with this group and see what people think.

• GitHub
• Download Page

Happy to go deeper in the comments, answer questions, take feedback, or help people get up and running!