Dev Tools

Plot twist: Automatic1111 hasn't shipped a meaningful release in months, and Forge has quietly become the default. Same interface, drastically better internals, and your existing checkpoints just work.

The Setup

Forge is a fork of the SD WebUI by lllyasviel — yes, the ControlNet creator. The big wins are the rewritten memory manager and the unified diffusion backend, which means you can run SDXL, Flux, and SD4 from the same install without checkpoint juggling.

git clone https://github.com/lllyasviel/stable-diffusion-webui-forge
cd stable-diffusion-webui-forge

# launch flags worth knowing
./webui.sh \
  --xformers \
  --opt-channelslast \
  --pin-shared-memory \
  --cuda-malloc \
  --cuda-stream

The Money Pattern

Most Auto1111 extensions install with zero changes. Drop them into extensions/ and restart. The Forge UI looks identical so muscle memory carries over.

# install a few of the standards
cd extensions
git clone https://github.com/Mikubill/sd-webui-controlnet
git clone https://github.com/Bing-su/adetailer
git clone https://github.com/continue-revolution/sd-webui-animatediff

# launch and the new tabs show up under txt2img
cd .. && ./webui.sh

The Catch

Some niche extensions still target Auto1111's exact internals and silently break — usually the ones that monkey-patch the sampler. The Forge community is shrinking the gap weekly, but if you depend on something obscure, check the issue tracker first. The UI is also still very UI — if you want a graph, you want ComfyUI instead.

The Verdict

If you're still on Auto1111 in 2026, you're paying a tax for nothing. Forge is faster, more memory-efficient, and actively maintained. Migrate this weekend. Your iteration loop will speed up enough to make the install worth it the first session.