DSPy vs Haystack
DSPy
dspy.ai
Haystack
haystack.deepset.aiSide by side
| Figure | DSPy | Haystack |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 2 |
| Spec score · LLM Application Development Frameworks | 7.6 (#10) | 8.2 (#7) |
| Spec score · Llm Developer Tools | 7.5 (#15) | 8.1 (#7) |
| Spec score · AI Orchestration Software | 7.5 (#14) | 8.0 (#9) |
| Deployment | The documentation describes deploying DSPy programs with FastAPI or MLflow. | Pipelines can be served as REST APIs or MCP servers with Hayhooks and run on your own infrastructure. |
| Founded | 2022 | 2018 |
| Installation | DSPy can be installed with pip or uv and works in Python 3.10+ environments. | The maker's quick-start page installs Haystack with pip using the package name haystack-ai. |
| Integrations | DSPy uses LiteLLM to normalize inference providers and says it can connect to nearly any model and provider supported by LiteLLM. | The integrations directory lists 189 integrations, including model providers, vector databases, monitoring tools, and community-built components. |
| Support | The site links to a DSPy Discord community and GitHub repository. | deepset offers private, secure engineering support, deployment guides, and flexible services for Haystack framework customers. |
| What it does | DSPy is a Python framework for building AI systems by expressing tasks as structured signatures instead of prompts. | Haystack is an open-source AI orchestration framework for building production-ready AI agents, multimodal applications, and advanced RAG systems. |
| Who it is for | The overview presents DSPy for building AI programs and systems, including agent, extraction, and multimodal tasks. | Haystack is built for AI developers and engineers creating accurate, modular, and transparent AI systems. |
Plans
Haystack
- Haystack Open Source FrameworkFree
- Haystack Enterprise PlatformPriced on request
In their own words
Haystack
Haystack is an open-source AI orchestration framework for developers building agents, multimodal applications, advanced retrieval-augmented generation systems and scalable search. Applications are assembled as modular pipelines from components such as retrievers, routers, memory layers, tools, evaluators and generators. Pipelines can run on users’ own infrastructure and be served as REST APIs or MCP servers with Hayhooks. The integrations directory lists 189 options across model providers, vector databases, monitoring tools and community components, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Elasticsearch, Pinecone and Datadog. A separate Enterprise Platform adds a visual pipeline builder, debugging, templates, indexing, a playground, prompt exploration, deployment and monitoring tools. It can run in managed cloud or self-hosted infrastructure and exposes a REST API. Listed enterprise security and compliance provisions include SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, CSA Star Level 1, RBAC, audit logs, traces, guardrails and SSO. A free platform trial is available by form request and includes cloud infrastructure for prototypes.