Open-source · Images · 3 of 17 tools · updated Oct 17, 2026
Open-source AI tools to edit & retouch photos with AI
ComfyUI leads the open-source options to edit & retouch photos with AI at 97/100, with 137,960 GitHub stars. 3 of the 17 tools tracked for this job publish their source, so you can read it, fork it or self-host it. It is also the top-ranked tool for this job overall, open-source or not.
Same evidence score as the ranking — GitHub stars, Hacker News mentions, release activity, free access — recomputed nightly, never sold. See all 17 tools to edit & retouch photos with AI.
Top 3
evidence / 100
+ Gets day-one support for new open models (Flux, Wan, Hunyuan) and lets you wire up any pipeline you can imagine.
− The node graph has a steep learning curve and shared workflows frequently break on missing custom nodes.
+ Best prompt adherence and hand/text rendering of any open-weight image model, with Kontext adding instruction-based editing.
− The dev weights are non-commercial, and the 12B model needs a 16GB+ GPU to run comfortably.
+ Huge extension ecosystem and years of tutorials make almost any workflow achievable locally.
− Development has slowed, newer models like Flux need forks (Forge), and setup is fiddly for non-technical users.
All 3, side by side
| Tool | Score | Stars | Source | Days idle | Platforms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ComfyUI | 97 | 137,960 | comfyanonymous/ComfyUI | 0 | windows, mac, linux |
| FLUX (Black Forest Labs) | 72 | 26,021 | black-forest-labs/flux | 442 | api, linux, web |
| Stable Diffusion WebUI (AUTOMATIC1111) | 64 | 165,071 | AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui | 228 | windows, mac, linux |
Open source here means the tool's own source is public, not that a vendor published an SDK. Self-hosting cost is yours.
Head to head: ComfyUI vs FLUX (Black Forest Labs) ComfyUI vs Stable Diffusion WebUI (AUTOMATIC1111) FLUX (Black Forest Labs) vs Stable Diffusion WebUI (AUTOMATIC1111)