head to head · open source
haystack vs django-rq
haystack has 26,559 GitHub stars, 3,153 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. django-rq has 1,950 stars, 294 forks, 118 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. haystack leads on adoption by 1,262% (26,559 vs 1,950 stars). haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0; django-rq is written in Python under MIT. haystack has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, django-rq 15%. haystack was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| haystack | django-rq | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 294 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick haystack if
- You weight community size — 27K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick django-rq if
- You want the django-rq feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and django-rq fits your workflow better
About haystack
Haystack is an open source AI orchestration framework written in Python under the Apache 2.0 licence, for building context engineered, production ready large language model applications as modular pipelines and agent workflows with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory, and generation, and it is aimed at developers and teams building scalable agents, retrieval augmented generation, multimodal applications, semantic search, question answering, and conversational systems.
read the full haystack overview →
About django-rq
django rq is Python app. It provides Django integration for RQ, Redis Queue. It lives in Django ecosystem. Category is Infrastructure & Operations / Orchestration & Scheduling. It lets developers configure queues in Django settings.py. It lets Django code push jobs to Redis backed queues.
read the full django-rq overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Orchestration & Scheduling projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Orchestration & Scheduling field.
Frequently asked questions
Is haystack or django-rq more popular?
haystack has 26,559 GitHub stars and django-rq has 1,950. haystack has the larger community by that measure.
Are haystack and django-rq free?
Both are open source. haystack is licensed under Apache-2.0 and django-rq under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between haystack and django-rq?
haystack is written in Python and django-rq in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, haystack or django-rq?
Choose haystack if you want the larger community (26,559 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose django-rq if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.