head to head · open source
haystack vs sre
haystack has 26,559 GitHub stars, 3,153 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sre has 1,293 stars, 202 forks, 35 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. haystack leads on adoption by 1,954% (26,559 vs 1,293 stars). haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0; sre is written in TypeScript under MIT. haystack has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, sre 16%. haystack was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (agent-framework, agents, ai, ai-agents), 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 | sre | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 202 |
| 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 sre if
- You want the sre feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and sre 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 sre
The SmythOS Runtime Environment (SRE) is an open source, cloud native runtime, SDK, and command line interface that developers use to build, run, and manage agentic AI across local, cloud, and edge environments.
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Frequently asked questions
Is haystack or sre more popular?
haystack has 26,559 GitHub stars and sre has 1,293. haystack has the larger community by that measure.
Are haystack and sre free?
Both are open source. haystack is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sre under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between haystack and sre?
haystack is written in Python and sre in TypeScript. 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 sre?
Choose haystack if you want the larger community (26,559 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sre if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.