head to head · open source
ragflow vs haystack
ragflow has 93,365 GitHub stars, 11,207 forks, 1,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. haystack has 26,913 stars, 3,384 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ragflow leads on adoption by 247% (93,365 vs 26,913 stars). ragflow is written in Go under Apache-2.0; haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0. ragflow has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, haystack 13%. haystack was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (agentic-ai, ai, ai-agents, context-engineering), 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
| ragflow | haystack | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 93K | ★ 27K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 3.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ragflow if
- You weight community size — 93K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 ragflow
Cloud Documentation Roadmap Discord 📕 Table of Contents 💡 What is RAGFlow? 🎮 Get Started 🔥 Latest Updates 🌟 Key Features 🔎 System Architecture 🎬 Self Hosting 🔧 Configurations 🔧 Build a Docker Image 🔨 Launch Service from Source for Development 📚 Documentation 📜 Roadmap 🏄 Community 🙌 Contributing 💡 What is RAGFlow? RAGFlow is a leading open source Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) engine that fuses cutting edge RAG with Agent capabilities to create a superior context layer for LLMs. It offers a streamlined RAG workflow adaptable to enterprises of any scale. Powered by a converged context engine…
read the full ragflow overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is ragflow or haystack more popular?
ragflow has 93,365 GitHub stars and haystack has 26,913. ragflow has the larger community by that measure.
Are ragflow and haystack free?
Both are open source. ragflow is licensed under Apache-2.0 and haystack under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ragflow and haystack?
ragflow is written in Go 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, ragflow or haystack?
Choose ragflow if you want the larger community (93,365 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose haystack if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.