head to head · open source
ragflow vs llama_index
ragflow has 93,365 GitHub stars, 11,207 forks, 1,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. llama_index has 52,779 stars, 8,500 forks, 770 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. ragflow leads on adoption by 77% (93,365 vs 52,779 stars). ragflow is written in Go under Apache-2.0; llama_index is written in Python under MIT. ragflow has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, llama_index 16%. ragflow was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | llama_index | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 93K | ★ 53K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 8.5K |
| 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 llama_index if
- You want the llama_index feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and llama_index 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 llama_index
🗂️ LlamaIndex (OSS Framework) 🦙 [!NOTE] The current focus of LlamaIndex is to build the best AI powered engine for document parsing and extraction. LlamaParse is our enterprise platform for agentic OCR, parsing, extraction, indexing and more. LiteParse represents our efforts to build the best free, fast, cheap text parser in the market. ParseBench and ExtractBench represent our commitment towards open benchmarking for parsing and extraction. The company itself has undergone an evolution since when this OSS framework first launched 3 years ago in 2023. Since the early days, the framework has consisted of a…
read the full llama_index overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is ragflow or llama_index more popular?
ragflow has 93,365 GitHub stars and llama_index has 52,779. ragflow has the larger community by that measure.
Are ragflow and llama_index free?
Both are open source. ragflow is licensed under Apache-2.0 and llama_index under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ragflow and llama_index?
ragflow is written in Go and llama_index 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 llama_index?
Choose ragflow if you want the larger community (93,365 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose llama_index if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.