Haystack
Composable pipeline framework for RAG and agent systems
Haystack is profiled here as a RAG Framework tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
Haystack is an open-source AI orchestration framework from deepset, the Berlin company Milos Rusic, Malte Pietsch, and Timo Moeller founded in 2018. Pipelines assemble typed components such as retrievers, embedders, rankers, and generators into explicit graphs, which keeps RAG and agent systems debuggable as they grow. The 2.x rewrite shipped in 2024 with a stable component API and serialization format. deepset has developed the framework since 2020, well before the current LLM wave, and that history shows in its mature retrieval and evaluation tooling.
Key Capabilities:
Composable pipeline graphs with typed component connections
Retrieval integrations for Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Qdrant, Weaviate, and pgvector
Agents with tool calling and loop control
Hayhooks for serving pipelines as REST APIs
Evaluation integrations for RAG quality measurement
Apache 2.0 license alongside the commercial deepset AI Platform
Alternative tools
- GraphRAG
Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation from Microsoft Research
- RAGFlow
Open-source RAG engine with deep document understanding
- Milvus
Open-source vector database built for billion-scale search
- txtai
All-in-one embeddings database for semantic search and RAG
- R2R
Production retrieval system with ingestion and an API
- Chroma
Developer-first embedding database that runs anywhere