Haystack vs LangChain

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.

LangChain is a free, MIT-licensed open-source framework for building agents with models and tools. Its create_agent harness combines a model, tools, prompt and middleware, with templates for common uses and a ReAct pattern. Middleware can add human approval, conversation compression, sensitive-data removal, guardrails, retries, routing and custom tool policies. Agents run on LangGraph’s durable runtime, which supports persistence, rewind, checkpointing and human-in-the-loop workflows. LangChain documents more than 1,000 integrations across chat and embedding models, tools, toolkits, document loaders and vector stores. Standard interfaces for chat models and embeddings support switching providers with minimal code changes. Documentation covers Python and JavaScript/TypeScript. LangSmith adds tracing, debugging and output evaluation. The framework supports API and self-hosted use. LangChain was started in 2023 and is headquartered in San Francisco.