AnythingLLM vs RAGFlow

AnythingLLM is a private AI assistant for desktop, mobile, cloud, and self-hosted use. Its desktop product runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and the free Desktop plan requires no account or API key and has no token limits. It can turn documents into an agent knowledge base while keeping the data on the device. Desktop tools include file-system capabilities, web search and scraping, model selection, background jobs, custom agent skills, and a Meeting Assistant that records, transcribes, summarizes, and indexes meetings on the computer without a bot joining or cloud processing. The mobile app runs small models on-device and includes web search, document chat, file generation, scheduled jobs, and memory. Supported providers range from Ollama and LM Studio to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini Pro. Cloud instances support multiple users, tenant isolation, admin controls, and white-labeling. Self-hosted data remains on the user's infrastructure, according to the maker. The free plan is available; Basic costs $50 a month and Pro costs $99 a month.

RAGFlow is an open-source retrieval-augmented generation engine and agent platform for building a context layer for AI agents. Its ingestion pipeline processes multiple data formats into semantic representations for retrieval. Search combines vector search and BM25 with custom scoring and re-ranking, while visual workflows connect retrieval, tools, and MCPs for agent orchestration. Users can connect online, local, and OpenAI-compatible model providers for knowledge bases, chats, search, and agents. Documented connectors include Notion, Google Drive, S3, Microsoft Teams, REST API, and Sitemap. RAGFlow provides HTTP and Python APIs, and a chat assistant can be embedded in another webpage using an iframe. It offers cloud and self-hosted deployment; Docker deployment has a stated minimum of 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM, and 50 GB disk. The free plan includes five apps, one team member, 0.1 GB of dataset storage, and 500 monthly credits, but no API key. Starter costs $29 a month and includes an API key.