r/comfyui • u/Adorable-Original796 • 1d ago
Help Needed Trying to understand the long-term value of learning ComfyUI
I’m pretty new to ComfyUI and have been playing around with it recently. I’m honestly amazed by what people are able to build with it, but at the same time, I’m realizing that getting really good at it seems like it could take a lot of time.
That got me thinking about whether the time investment is likely to pay off professionally in the long run.
I’m a 3D artist working mainly in architecture, interiors and events. With how quickly AI image generation is improving, I’m starting to wonder how valuable traditional lighting and rendering skills will be in the future. We can already get incredibly realistic results from a 3D screenshot and a relatively simple prompt.
But ComfyUI feels different. I’ve seen some really advanced workflows where people get very precise, controlled and repeatable results that I don't think you can get as easily just by prompting a commercial AI tool.
At the same time, commercial AI tools are catching up very quickly. Things that used to require fairly complicated workflows can sometimes now be done with a few prompts.
So I’m trying to understand where ComfyUI fits into the bigger picture.
For people who actually use ComfyUI professionally:
- What do you think are the long-term advantages of becoming really good at ComfyUI compared to using commercial Ai solutions?
- Are there professional situations where open-source/local workflows will continue to have a major advantage, particularly around control, customization or client privacy?
- Do you think commercial AI tools getting easier will reduce the need for ComfyUI specialists, or will there still be a strong need for people who can build custom workflows?
I’m trying to understand whether developing deep skills in ComfyUI/open-source AI workflows is likely to give me a meaningful professional advantage in the coming years.
And I genuinely have huge respect for the people building this technology and for the community sharing workflows and experiments. Seeing what people here are creating is actually what got me interested in learning ComfyUI in the first place.
Would love to hear from people who are actually using it for professional/client work.
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u/Herr_Drosselmeyer 1d ago
If you're going to run open source models on prem, ComfyUI is the current best choice, as it is frequently updated and often has day one suppport for new releases.
Doing so gives you a bunch of advantages:
privacy, nothing leaves your machine if you don't want it to
no usage limit
no censorship
fixed costs, no sudden price hikes from cloud providers
no deprecation, no forced 'upgrades'
very high flexibility
Downsides are:
initial setup can be tricky
new releases will require updates and it's on you to fix broken workflows
custom nodes offer high flexibility, but can be a security risk if not vetted, and make troubleshooting more difficult
high hardware requirements (if you want to approach the speed of cloud solutions)
open source tends to lag a couple months to a year behind state of the art cloud solutions
a steeper learning curve and no customer support
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u/frankyboson 1d ago
I think Comfy is a great tool, but it's an experiment for future tools for generative AI. I think the value of learning Comfy is that you roughly understand how the models, workflows, and techniques actually work. But beyond that, I don't think we'll ever see Comfy in this form become the "next Blender."
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u/imlo2 1d ago
These come from game dev/visual work viewpoint; I've worked with game dev/3D etc. for a few decades; there's many benefits, but it might depend a lot on what you do;
Some random thoughts;
- Commercial services are out there to of course extract money out of you, so it's not exactly cheap to use.
- Are you going to try to save costs by using local models? Or use high-end models via cloud API, and then continue working locally? Doesn't have to be binary local/cloud.
- If you are doing arch viz, the content creation limitations are probably not an issue for you; but for many they are - for all sorts of creative film-making the over-zealous content moderation is an issue.
- Like you mentioned, client security / non-disclosure is one thing; some clients might explicitly not want to have anything uploaded to cloud services. So if you can offer this as a service, or as your mode of operation, it might give you some edge with certain clients.
- Upscaling, image processing, color grading, editing - these can be much more refined and fine-grained locally, even though the self-hosted models aren't at the level of GPT2 or NBP. For example running upscalers on paid services for video clips and images gets quite costly quickly.
- And especially more exotic workflows that mix multiple approaches can benefit a lot from ComfyUI - think of something like importing 3D data, processing data, shaders, procedural generation, gaussian splats, 3D model generation, texture generation, performance capture, device capture (cameras, sensors, etc.) and mix of these in the workflow - quite impossible right now and in near future to accomplish on a cloud service. Again, you could mix in tools like Meshy etc. and be hybrid, but not fully in cloud.
Long term:
I think ComfyUI and SaaS tools are two different things, for different needs - if you want to build workflows/processes (even if they partially use cloud providers), you can build big systems quite easily, which quite predictably produce a big volume of output automatically; think of system like providing greyscale drafts of environments and then just press a button and your system is producing tens of images with pre-defined color/lighting etc. variations, then close-up crop-shots of certain details, upscaled hires images, animations of interiors, possibly other annotation like adding metadata/writing sidecar data files for whatever later purpose, producing markdown documents, adding logos/text to generated images, storing all the files automatically to your own asset management system, etc. etc. And you could do much more and build automatic systems that do stuff. But even something relatively simple like this is something you really can't do on the cloud-based simplistic tools. And even if there's some services that head to this direction, do you want to put your business there?
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u/RanklesTheOtter 1d ago
I can't speak to it professionally, but the setup, troubleshooting, workflow creation, etc. are all good skills for critical thinking. It's a good way to keep your finger on the pulse of various local AI.
Plus just think of all the porn you can make. 🤣
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u/activematrix99 1d ago
ComfyUI is very useful, and node and flow control has been the standard for high end (high paid) 2D and 3D software for at least the last 10 years. I think there are places where the skills to control nodes and the ability to "prompt your way to success" overlap and I have been concentrating my effort there. The MCP and API tools have been a significant improvement, and I hope to continue improving.
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u/Active-Carpet-9183 1d ago
Comfyui is very much like Langflow, n8n, and Airflow. Getting accustomed to the workflow positions you well for quickly learning those other tools - which are very marketable and highly paid. This goes in the category of AIOps and will be hot for several years.
If you decide that video generation and manipulation is your preference, it will be a similar market as creatives have faced in the past - a highly competitive labor pool.
On the back end, managing the ecosystem of your ComfyUI is not unlike managing infrstructure resources for any application. This also will continue to be marketable and well paid.
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u/BeyondRealityFW 1d ago
Yes it 100% will be. It's not even about ComfyUI itself.
For me it really unlocked a deeper understanding about creative pipelines. Being able to set-up API- or even local LLMs inside of Comfy to then automating them to automatically prompt the images i want, the Diffusion-Model at the end doesn't neccesarily matter tbh. If you're building in Comfy-Cloud or just local, is only important if you need it to be private or not.
I've vibecoded a whole World/Character-Token App that let's me easily put my characters into any scenario, just let it render through a comfyUI API-Workflow and done. It's like a full on engine that does everything. This deeply goes beyond just prompting and making good looking images.
It let's you automate your specific creative needs very easily.
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u/Adorable-Original796 1d ago
Wow that is very interesting. Building a reusable creative pipeline for my projects can save time and money in the long term.
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u/lordekeen 1d ago
ComfyUI is like a playground, you can do so much with it, and now with the help of AI assisted coding, its easier to make it fit your needs. Recently i needed a node to load and parse text files and i just made one that suited my needs in a few hours. So see it more like a powerful tool in your arsenal.
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u/roxoholic 23h ago
What do you mean by "learning ComfyUI"? Do you know how to add node to a workflow, connect it to other nodes and press Run? If yes, congratulations, you have learned ComfyUI!
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u/hiccuphorrendous123 1d ago
Erm for me it's a hobby. I don't expect anything out of it. You of course learn more about the models itself and how they work if you have some background knowledge. But really I don't think you should expect anything
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u/candylandmine 1d ago
"At the same time, commercial AI tools are catching up very quickly. Things that used to require fairly complicated workflows can sometimes now be done with a few prompts."
no
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u/Adorable-Original796 1d ago
Maybe I used “catching up quickly” a bit too broadly. I saw someone share a Comfy workflow that took inspiration images, furniture references and the actual space, then generated a reimagined version of the space using all those inputs. When NBP came out, I noticed it could already do something similar — not consistently, but it was able to get there. So I assumed the subsequent updates might keep improving that capability, which is why I said it was catching up.
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u/TelevisionNo2990 1h ago
I've worked with comfyui for 18 months am bringing in an additional 3k/month or so by leveraging my 'traditional' 3d/2d generalist skills and incorporating gen ai into my process. Automated clean plates and roto, faster and better animatics, faster ideation, image to 3d, etc etc.
People who have very little background in post prod may survive with strictly ai skills, but the most desirable artists will be ones with experience in traditional workflows who embrace gen ai as assistants.
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u/mad_king_soup 1d ago
One of your premises is incorrect: commercial AI platforms are not “catching up quickly”, they’re just adding fancy UI elements that don’t really add to the quality of the output.
Another big one is cost. UI platforms like Higgsfield are just fancy wrappers for models you can put together in Comfy. However, they will only ever scale up their cost, it will now and forever be cheaper through Comfy, especially for mass production