dify-docs/en/guides/application-orchestrate

Application Orchestration

In Dify, an "application" refers to a practical scenario application built on large language models like GPT. By creating an application, you can apply intelligent AI technology to specific needs. It encompasses both the engineering paradigm for developing AI applications and the specific deliverables.

In short, an application provides developers with:

• A user-friendly API that can be directly called by backend or frontend applications, authenticated via Token
• A ready-to-use, aesthetically pleasing, and hosted WebApp, which you can further develop using the WebApp template
• An easy-to-use interface that includes prompt engineering, context management, log analysis, and annotation

You can choose any one or all of these to support your AI application development.

Application Types

Dify offers four types of applications:

• Chat Assistant: A conversational assistant built on LLM
• Text Generation: An assistant for text generation tasks such as writing stories, text classification, translation, etc.
• Agent: A conversational intelligent assistant capable of task decomposition, reasoning, and tool invocation
• Workflow: Defines more flexible LLM workflows based on process orchestration

The differences between Text Generation and Chat Assistant are shown in the table below:

	Text Generation	Chat Assistant
WebApp Interface	Form + Results	Chat-based
WebAPI Endpoint	completion-messages	chat-messages
Interaction Mode	One question, one answer	Multi-turn conversation
Streaming Results	Supported	Supported
Context Preservation	Per session	Continuous
User Input Form	Supported	Supported
Datasets and Plugins	Supported	Supported
AI Opening Remarks	Not supported	Supported
Example Scenarios	Translation, judgment, indexing	Chatting