Model highlights
A chronological tour of the open image & video models you can run locally in ComfyUI — what each is best at, and how to set it up in one command with a comfyui-mcp pack and the Panel. Oldest first, ending on the current open-weight champ, Ideogram 4.WAN 2.2
The open-source video king — how the high/low-noise experts actually work,
I2V/T2V, GGUF tiers, and longer videos.
Qwen-Image & Qwen-Image-Edit
20B text-to-image plus instruction editing and manual-mask inpainting, with a
WAN 2.2 refine combo.
WAN Animate 2.2
Drive a character with a reference video — v2v character & motion replace from
a single image.
WAN Transparent Expressions
Alpha-channel character expression sprites (looping WebP/GIF) for SillyTavern
and VTuber overlays.
Z-Image (Turbo & Base)
6B, runs under 8 GB — the low-VRAM speed king. Turbo vs Base, ControlNet, and
your own LoRAs.
ERNIE-Image
Apache-2.0 text-to-image with razor-sharp multilingual text rendering, under
8 GB VRAM.
ANIMA 1.0
A ~2B anime model that generates and trains under 6 GB — Danbooru tags plus
natural language.
LTX-2.3
Fast GGUF video (T2V/I2V) and the LTX Director timeline editor inside ComfyUI.
Krea 2 Turbo
Krea.ai’s 12B open-weight text-to-image — 8-step turbo speed, Qwen3-VL
prompting, and JSON area prompts.
Ideogram 4 — the finale
The 9.3B open-weight king of readable in-image text and design layout, with
JSON area prompting.
Video post-production
Upscaling video in ComfyUI
SeedVR2 & FlashVSR temporal restore, the downscale-first trick, the quick
per-frame ESRGAN path, and RIFE/FILM interpolation (built into ComfyUI 0.26).
Extending video with Pusa
Pusa 2.2 temporal flowmatching on the WAN 2.2 stack — continue a clip instead
of regenerating it, chain extensions, all on your own GPU.
Posts
ComfyUI on RunPod: rent a cloud GPU
A first-party RunPod connector: one-tap deploy of a pod that runs YOUR exact
custom nodes and models, an honest local⇄pod host pill, live GPU/cost status,
and idle auto-stop — driven from the panel and the phone, no console or CLI.
July 21, 2026
Train a FLUX LoRA in the cloud on RunPod
No 24 GB card? Rent one. The LoRA trainer’s new SSH transport stands ai-toolkit
up on a RunPod pod and runs the same train_* flow on rented hardware — dataset
up over ssh, .safetensors back in models/loras/. July 21, 2026
Train a character LoRA by asking
The panel agent drives ostris’s ai-toolkit end to end through train_* tools —
preflight, dataset staging, streamed progress, honest cancel — verified with a
real FLUX.1-dev character run on a 4090. July 20, 2026
Blind mode: a privacy promise the agent can't break
A user proved our “the agent never sees the image” toggle was leaky. The fix:
enforcement at the tool-server boundary — one wrapper that withholds pixels
from every image-returning tool, current and future, mechanically rather than
promptably. July 20, 2026
GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna land in the ComfyUI panel
The new frontier family on your ChatGPT subscription — max and ultra efforts
with per-model ceilings from the live catalog, account-aware deprecation that
never force-switches a runnable pin, and the SDK-pin war story behind tracking
a fast-moving provider. July 20, 2026
Kimi K3: the biggest open-weight model ever now drives your ComfyUI canvas
Moonshot’s 2.8T-parameter K3 — third on the intelligence boards, first on
Frontend Code Arena, weights landing July 27 — became a first-class provider
two days after release. Why it’s a big deal, the honest caveats
(always-max thinking, $15/M output), and the one-key setup. July 18, 2026
The 405 that wasn't: three dialects of ComfyUI-Manager
A debugging war story in three acts: per-operation routes vs task envelopes vs
a legacy UI hiding under /v2 — and the frontend catchall that turns every wrong
guess into a 405. July 18, 2026
Your conversation now survives workflow switching
The conversation is the unit of continuity; the workflow is just the canvas
target. How the orchestrator rebinds a live agent across workflow tabs — no
respawn, so even in-memory local models keep their history. July 17, 2026
CivitAI inside ComfyUI: browse, like, and run without a download folder
A full CivitAI browser in the sidebar — lightbox with generation details,
like/unlike with a synced likes collection, @creator search qualifiers, and
workflows that load straight onto the live canvas. July 17, 2026
The render finished while you were making coffee: ComfyUI on your phone
The mobile companion (iOS + Android beta): same agent, same providers, CivitAI
parity, one multi-purpose QR to pair — and tab-mirror remote control that lets
the phone drive a desktop session. July 16, 2026
Flatten the spaghetti: making expert workflows readable
Get/Set buses, Reroutes, and use-everywhere broadcasts resolved to direct
links IN PLACE — layout, groups, and widgets preserved — plus the
positional-widget bug the work exposed. July 15, 2026
The orchestrator that never goes stale
Hourly npm self-update and dev-build self-restart, coalesced to fire only when
every agent is idle and nothing is rendering — infrastructure that updates like
a browser, not a printer driver. July 14, 2026
We fine-tuned Gemma 4 to drive ComfyUI — and built an arena to prove it
A gemma4 ladder (e2b/e4b/12b) trained on server-verified trajectories, scored
by a best-of-3 arena of real ComfyUI tasks — including the regression we
published against our own model, the train/serve format mismatch behind it, and
the temperature-0 loop bug the arena couldn’t see. July 14, 2026
Giving every backend eyes — and honesty when a model doesn't have them
Vision is a property of the model, not the provider. Always attempt image
delivery, strip-and-retry once on rejection, and leave an in-history note so
the model can never pretend it saw an attachment it didn’t. July 14, 2026
Bring any LLM: free local models now drive ComfyUI
Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — no account,
no API key, fully offline. The compact tool router that makes ~200 tools fit a
4B model, the loop-breakers small models need, and the VRAM pause that lets one
GPU run both the diffusion model and the LLM driving it. July 14, 2026
Two brains, one canvas: ComfyUI on Claude or ChatGPT
The ComfyUI sidebar agent now runs on EITHER your Claude or your ChatGPT
subscription — pick a provider, no API keys, full canvas-driving parity. How we
got there: an AgentBackend port, Codex over its app-server, panel tools as a
loopback MCP, and the schema gotcha that kept eating a tool. June 25, 2026
The self-healing ComfyUI agent: it fixes the node that crashed it
A Wan2.2 render hard-crashes ComfyUI at 99% with a native access violation. The
agent reads the crash dump on reload, names the culprit node, and escalates —
update → git pull → patch → offer a PR — plus install→restart→continue and
video-vision so it can judge its own output. June 25, 2026
The panel that talks back: an autonomous agent on your Claude subscription
Three tries to get the ComfyUI panel driven by a real background agent: channel
pushes can’t wake an idle session, the
--sdk-url transport that did everything
got locked down, and the Claude Agent SDK’s streaming input — persistent,
injectable, interruptible, subscription-authenticated, no API key — turned out
to be the gold standard. June 16, 2026Installer packs that can't rot: one manifest, every install
The community “1-click installer” .bat is great UX and a maintenance trap —
Windows-only, duplicated in a separate .sh, full of model URLs that rot
silently. How a single manifest drives both the double-click scripts and an
MCP-native install, with CI that fails the build the moment a model link dies.
June 16, 2026
From B to A: sharpening 70+ tool descriptions with TDQS
A case study using Glama’s Tool Definition Quality Score to find and fix the one weak tool that
was capping our whole server — plus five rules any MCP author can steal. May 25, 2026