head to head · open source
langgraph vs haystack
langgraph has 41,863 GitHub stars, 7,069 forks, 786 open issues and last shipped today. haystack has 26,534 stars, 3,144 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped today. langgraph leads on adoption by 58% (41,863 vs 26,534 stars). langgraph is written in Python under MIT; haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0. langgraph has attracted 17% as many forks as stars, haystack 12%. langgraph was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (agents, ai, ai-agents, 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
| langgraph | haystack | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 42K | ★ 27K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.1K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick langgraph if
- You weight community size — 42K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick haystack if
- You want the haystack feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and haystack fits your workflow better
About langgraph
LangGraph is a low level Python orchestration framework for building stateful, long running agents, aimed at developers and platform teams who need durable execution, human in the loop control, and persistent memory instead of a turnkey agent application.
read the full langgraph overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is langgraph or haystack more popular?
langgraph has 41,863 GitHub stars and haystack has 26,534. langgraph has the larger community by that measure.
Are langgraph and haystack free?
Both are open source. langgraph is licensed under MIT and haystack under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between langgraph and haystack?
langgraph is written in Python and haystack in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, langgraph or haystack?
Choose langgraph if you want the larger community (41,863 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose haystack if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.