head to head · open source
haystack vs sre
haystack has 26,924 GitHub stars, 3,388 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped today. sre has 1,302 stars, 204 forks, 35 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. haystack leads on adoption by 1,968% (26,924 vs 1,302 stars). haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0; sre is written in TypeScript under MIT. haystack has attracted 13% 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 | 2026-11-04 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 204 |
| 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 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 sre
SmythOS The Linux of AI Agents Reliable Agent Engineering starts with great, open source infrastructure. This repository contains the Smyth Runtime Environment Kernel (SRE), the Software Development Kit (SDK) and Command Line Interface (CLI) for running agents and creating them with code. If you prefer visual drag & drop agent interfaces instead, check out our open source SmythOS Visual Agent Studio! Great community, support, tutorials. Start in minutes! SmythOS Runtime Environment (SRE) SRE is an open source runtime and SDK for production AI agents. It provides OS level abstractions for AI resources—LLMs…
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Frequently asked questions
Is haystack or sre more popular?
haystack has 26,924 GitHub stars and sre has 1,302. 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 (26,924 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sre if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.