sdxl / comfy / createImage

Of the two "classic" image models in the Civitai pack, SDXL is the one that makes more sense as a cloud call. SD1.5 runs on anything; SDXL is a different animal - base + refiner architecture, bigger UNet, and a real VRAM appetite that rules out a lot of laptops and any iGPU. So sdxl / comfy / createImage is the node you reach for when you want the modern Civitai catalog - the checkpoints that actually dominate the site's front page are SDXL-family - but your machine can't comfortably host one. It's still a "model you could run locally" in the strict sense, and the community's API-node skepticism applies, but the hardware bar makes the cloud call defensible in a way the SD1.5 one isn't.

Mechanically it's the standard pack pattern: prompt goes to Civitai's orchestration API, the job renders on their fleet, billed in Buzz, and the result lands back in your graph as an IMAGE tensor. The defaults are pure SDXL: 1024×1024, 30 steps, cfg 7. And the wiring story is the same as the SD1.5 node - the model input is a required CIVITAI_AIR socket you fill with a Civitai Model Selector, which gives you the browse-a-card-grid way to pick an SDXL checkpoint without downloading a 6GB file.

The inputs that matter

Required: prompt and model (CIVITAI_AIR socket → wire a Civitai Model Selector; there's no default checkpoint).

• negative_prompt - SDXL is more forgiving than SD1.5 but still rewards a good negative.
• steps (30) / cfg_scale (7) - the SDXL sweet spot. Some popular SDXL checkpoints prefer cfg 5–6; 7 is a safe universal.
• width / height - 1024×1024 default. SDXL's native band is 1024; it can stretch to 1536 but quality sags past there.
• sampler / scheduler - full ComfyUI menus.
• vae_model / loras / control_nets - CIVITAI sockets from the Selector nodes. Hosted SDXL LoRA stacking is a genuinely convenient way to try Civitai's biggest LoRA catalog.
• quantity, seed, output_format, image_metadata - standard.

Outputs: images (IMAGE), errors, workflow_id, raw_json.

Install and auth

One install for the whole pack. ComfyUI Manager → Civitai Comfy Nodes, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/civitai/civitai-comfy-nodes.git
pip install -r civitai-comfy-nodes/requirements.txt

Then authenticate (Civitai account with Buzz): export CIVITAI_API_TOKEN=..., a Civitai Auth node, or the sidebar sign-in.

The honest call

The failure modes are the same as its SD1.5 sibling: forget to wire the required model socket and you get a local "missing required input" error before anything is billed. The subtler trap is comparing it to the newer hosted engines in the same menu - Flux2-dev, Krea 2 - and wondering why you're paying for SDXL at all. The answer is the catalog: the node's real value is that the Civitai ecosystem's most abundant checkpoints and LoRAs are SDXL-shaped, and this is how you use them without a card that can host them. If you just want "a good image," the newer engines are better value; if you want that specific SDXL checkpoint you love, this is the door.