head to head · open source
haystack vs ergo
haystack has 26,913 GitHub stars, 3,384 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ergo has 4,693 stars, 193 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. haystack leads on adoption by 473% (26,913 vs 4,693 stars). haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0; ergo is written in Go under MIT. haystack has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, ergo 4%. haystack was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (framework), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | ergo | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 193 |
| 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 ergo if
- You want the ergo feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ergo 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 ergo
Actor model for Go. Build distributed systems without the distributed systems headache. Goroutines and channels work great until your system grows. Then come the mutexes, the race conditions, the service discovery configs, the retry logic, the connection pool management. Ergo replaces all of that with one model: isolated processes that communicate through messages, supervised automatically, addressable across any cluster. Inspired by Erlang/OTP. Zero external dependencies. Pure Go. The core idea in 30 seconds No locks. No race conditions. Sequential message handling is the guarantee. Why not just goroutines +…
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Frequently asked questions
Is haystack or ergo more popular?
haystack has 26,913 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,693. haystack has the larger community by that measure.
Are haystack and ergo free?
Both are open source. haystack is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ergo under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between haystack and ergo?
haystack is written in Python and ergo in Go. 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 ergo?
Choose haystack if you want the larger community (26,913 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.