Introduction
ComfyUI is a visual interface for creating and running Stable Diffusion workflows. I guess it’s “comfy” relative speaking when compared to building pure PyTorch / Python code. It’s not truly “comfy” for beginners because there’s a lot going on, so prepare for a learning curve.
The good thing about using ComfyUI vs. PyTorch is that you can see your workflow’s progress and intermediate results as it runs. That is for sure way more interesting than looking at log outputs.
Installation
ComfyUI needs to run on some GPU machines / virtual machines. You have roughly two options:
- Run it on your GPU-based machine (Windows / Mac / Linux). For this tutorial, I will focus on Mac OS X and via a specific program manager to make life easier.
- Run it via some online GPU services. There’s many of these right now and generally they don’t cost too much. Typically, you setup a virtual machine with a specific GPU and get charged by the hour. Some are specifically for Stable Diffusion (what I would recommend) such as RunDiffusion, ThinkDiffusion, RunComfy. Others give you a generic virtual machine / container and you can install and do whatever you want, e.g., Runpod, Lightning AI, Google CoLab. I will show RunDiffusion briefly in this tutorial.
Mac OS X
This works if you have a Mac-silicon machine such as M1, M2, M3, and M4. I installed mine on a M4 Pro MacBook Pro.
Install Stability Matrix
The easiest way is perhaps to install this app Stability Matrix, which allows you to then install ComfyUI or other “UI” for running these visual workflows and models.
To install it, go to Stability Matrix GitHub page here: https://github.com/LykosAI/StabilityMatrix

Scroll past the files and you’ll see the above header — click on the small link to the specific OS (Mac in this case) and download. And of course open that file (.dmg for Mac) on your machine to install.
Test Run
Click on …
Create a new ComfyUI Package
One technical thing to note is that Python is installed automatically when a new package is created — it doesn’t use your system’s Python at all. Specifically, if you go into your package folder (/Applications/Data/Packages/ComfyUI/), you can see all kinds of .py files as well as /venv — where a specific Python3 version is installed and used.