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A knowledge base gives your apps your own content to answer from. When a question comes in, the most relevant passages are found and handed to the model along with it, so the answer draws on your content rather than only on what the model learned in training. Use one for anything your apps should know that a model doesn’t, such as a help center, internal policies, a product catalog, or research material. Create one per domain or team, and connect it to the apps that need it.

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Two Kinds of Knowledge Base

Which one fits depends mostly on the apps you’re building and how much of the processing you want to control.
An agent knowledge base keeps setup simple: add your content, and it organizes and indexes everything on its own.Choose it when you want:
  • Deeper searches for harder questions: pick Fast, Deep, or Research as its retrieval depth.
  • Content that stays current: connected websites, online documents, and online drives refresh on the schedule you set.
  • Built-in quality checks: re-test key questions after every change, and track what retrieval misses.
  • Access for coding agents: they read its content through the Dify CLI.
Workflow and Chatflow apps and the new Agent can use it. For a new project, start here.
Most classic knowledge bases can be upgraded to agent ones later, but agent knowledge bases can’t be turned into classic ones.

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Compare the Two Kinds

Both kinds share the same permission choices, document quota, request rate limit, and knowledge base API keys. Both also make images searchable with a vision-capable embedding model.
Last modified on October 28, 2026