VAE Input Switch

VAE Input Switch does the same job as the suite's other input-switch nodes - Model, CLIP, Conditioning, Image, Upscale Model, and more - just for VAEs: feed it two VAE inputs and a boolean, and it outputs whichever one the boolean selects. No decoding or encoding happens here, it's pure routing.

Why you'd want to switch VAEs mid-graph

VAEs matter more than people expect for a component that "just" decodes latents to pixels. A checkpoint's baked-in VAE isn't always the one you want to use - some checkpoints ship VAEs that are noticeably worse than a dedicated fixed VAE for that base model, and plenty of experienced users routinely override the baked-in VAE with a known-good separate one loaded via a Load VAE node. If you're comparing two checkpoints, or two VAE files, against the same latent to see which decodes cleaner, or you want a fast approximate VAE for quick previews and the full-quality one for a final pass, this switch lets you flip between them with a single boolean instead of manually rewiring the connection every time.

It's the same underlying pattern as every other switch in the suite - if you've used one, this one behaves identically, just for the VAE socket type.

How it compares to newer alternatives

If you're already running rgthree-comfy, its switch and context nodes cover similar ground with a more polished UI and clearer visual feedback about which branch is currently active. WAS's version is plainer - a boolean and two sockets, nothing more - but it's reliable, and if you're already using WAS for other utilities there's no real reason to bring in a second pack purely for this.

Installing it

Through ComfyUI Manager: search "WAS Node Suite", install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/WASasquatch/was-node-suite-comfyui
cd was-node-suite-comfyui
pip install -r requirements.txt

Pure graph logic - nothing to download for this node itself.

Troubleshooting

The usual switch-node gotcha applies: both VAE inputs need to actually be connected for the node to run, even the branch you're not currently selecting - leaving one dangling produces a missing-input error rather than the switch just quietly ignoring it.

Beyond that, this is about as low-risk as WAS nodes get, since it touches no external library. If it's missing from your node menu entirely, that's the whole-suite import problem - WAS Node Suite hasn't seen active development since December 2023, and a ComfyUI core update can occasionally break the pack's startup over a stale pinned dependency elsewhere in it (BLIP support is the recurring one). Check your console log before troubleshooting this node specifically.