head to head · open source
haystack vs ergo
haystack has 26,531 GitHub stars, 3,144 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ergo has 4,660 stars, 191 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. haystack leads on adoption by 469% (26,531 vs 4,660 stars). haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0; ergo is written in Go under MIT. haystack has attracted 12% 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 | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 191 |
| 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 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 ergo
Ergo is an actor based framework for Go that brings network transparency to event driven architecture, drawing direct inspiration from Erlang/OTP. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is distributed as a pure Go library with zero external dependencies. The framework models every unit of work as an isolated process that communicates only through messages, so shared state, mutexes, and race conditions are eliminated by design rather than managed by convention.
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Frequently asked questions
Is haystack or ergo more popular?
haystack has 26,531 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,660. 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 (26,531 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.