AUTOMATIC1111

What is AUTOMATIC1111?

AUTOMATIC1111 is the name of a developer and of the project everyone just calls 'the webui'. It appeared in August 2022, only days after Stable Diffusion 1.4 hit the internet, and it quickly became the standard way for hobbyists to run the model on their own computers. You start it on your machine, your browser opens a page at localhost:7860, and from there everything is point and click.

It is not an official Stability AI product. It is a community project, which is exactly why it moves the way it does: new models, new techniques and new extensions show up in the webui within days of appearing in research papers. For years it was the fastest way to try anything new in the Stable Diffusion world.

The project is open source and famously extensible. Nearly every popular Stable Diffusion workflow, from ControlNet pose control to LoRA character training to upscaling, started life as an extension or a script for AUTOMATIC1111.

Key Features

• txt2img and img2img generation from text prompts and reference images
• Inpainting and outpainting to edit or extend existing images
• Prompt weighting, negative prompts and batch generation
• Model management for checkpoints, LoRAs and embeddings
• ControlNet support through extensions for pose, depth and line control
• Built-in upscalers and face restoration
• Huge library of community extensions and scripts
• Runs fully offline on your own hardware

How to get started

The classic setup is a local install. You need Python and Git, then you clone the repository and run the launcher script for your operating system. On Windows that is webui-user.bat, on macOS and Linux it is webui.sh. The first run downloads dependencies, which takes a while, and then opens the interface in your browser.

Out of the box the webui ships with a default model, but most people download checkpoints from sites like Civitai or Hugging Face and drop them into the models folder. From there, generation is just a prompt, a sampler and a click.

• Install Python and Git on your machine
• Clone the stable-diffusion-webui repository from GitHub
• Run webui-user.bat on Windows or webui.sh on macOS and Linux
• Wait for the first-run setup, then open the browser UI
• Add checkpoints, LoRAs or extensions and start generating

Use cases

• Concept art and character design for games and projects
• Texture and sprite generation for game development
• Inpainting fixes: removing objects or touching up details
• Upscaling old or low-resolution artwork
• Experimenting with custom models, LoRAs and styles
• Learning image generation: the webui is the classic teaching tool

Pricing and licensing

AUTOMATIC1111 is free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, so there is no software cost at all. The real cost is hardware: running Stable Diffusion comfortably needs a GPU with a decent amount of VRAM, and heavy users often buy or rent one.

Remember that the license covers the webui software itself. The models you run through it, and the images you generate, have their own licenses depending on which checkpoint you use, so check the model page if you plan to sell or publish your outputs.

Pros and cons

The webui's superpowers are its freedom and its ecosystem. It is free, runs offline, works on Windows, macOS and Linux, and the sheer volume of extensions and tutorials means almost any workflow has been documented somewhere.

The trade-offs are speed and polish. It is heavier and slower than newer interfaces like Forge or ComfyUI, and development slowed noticeably through 2024 as the community moved on. If you are starting fresh in 2025, many people recommend Forge as a drop-in replacement with the same interface and better performance.

Alternatives

• Stable Diffusion WebUI Forge: same interface, optimized for speed and lower VRAM
• ComfyUI: node-based workflow builder for maximum control
• SD.Next: a maintained fork with extra features
• InvokeAI: polished canvas-based interface with strong inpainting
• Fooocus: simple one-click interface for beginners