head to head · open source
haystack vs cloudstack
haystack has 26,924 GitHub stars, 3,388 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cloudstack has 3,126 stars, 1,418 forks, 1,048 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. haystack leads on adoption by 761% (26,924 vs 3,126 stars). haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0; cloudstack is written in Java under Apache-2.0. haystack has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, cloudstack 45%. 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.
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Side by side
| haystack | cloudstack | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 cloudstack if
- You want the cloudstack feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and cloudstack fits your workflow better
About haystack
🎉🎊✨ Haystack 3.0 is out! ✨🎊🎉 Read the announcement here! 🥳 🎈 🎆 🪅 🎇 🍾 🥂 🎁 🌈 Haystack is an open source AI orchestration framework for building production ready LLM applications in Python. Design modular pipelines and agent workflows with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory, and generation. Build scalable RAG systems, multimodal applications, semantic search, question answering, and autonomous agents, all in a transparent architecture that lets you experiment, customize deeply, and deploy with confidence. Table of Contents Installation Documentation Features Haystack Enterprise: Support &…
read the full haystack overview →
About cloudstack
Apache CloudStack Who Uses CloudStack? Demo Getting Started Getting Source Repository Documentation News and Events Getting Involved and Contributing Reporting Security Vulnerabilities License Notice of Cryptographic Software Star History Contributors Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. CloudStack is used by a number of service providers to offer public cloud services, and by many companies to provide an on premises (private) cloud offering…
read the full cloudstack overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is haystack or cloudstack more popular?
haystack has 26,924 GitHub stars and cloudstack has 3,126. haystack has the larger community by that measure.
Are haystack and cloudstack free?
Both are open source. haystack is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cloudstack under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between haystack and cloudstack?
haystack is written in Python and cloudstack in Java. 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 cloudstack?
Choose haystack if you want the larger community (26,924 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cloudstack if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.