I hate to ask a product comparison question, but why would I use this versus other projects like PySyft.

Thanks for the question, very natural to ask. We are also fans of PySft. It offers support for a very wide range of privacy enhancing machine learning tools. But where Flower and PySft differ is in focus. Federated learning is difficult and requires many technical moving parts all working together (e.g., secure aggregation, differential privacy, scalable simulation, device deployments, integration with conventional ML frameworks etc.). All of these need to tightly integrated, and in a manner that performs federated learning efficiently. This is where Flower currently excels. It offers comprehensive, extensible and, most important, easy to use construction of federations that need these different parts together. We believe it offers the best user experience for federated learning currently out there. We hope in the future many tool suites that offer private machine learning (like PySft and others) will actually adopt Flower components so we can all work better together.

I appreciate you taking the time to break this down, I’ve spent a decent chunk of time having to roll my own stuff so when pygrid/pysyft came along it was just easier. I will say the flower components look interesting and I’ll give it a shot

Can confirm that PySyft is currently in the process of integrating with Flower. Best of both worlds.

Indeed - looking forward to this