Haystack vs LlamaIndex

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.

LlamaIndex is a freemium platform for developers and enterprises automating document processing and AI workflows. LlamaParse handles more than 50 unstructured file types, including files with embedded images, complex layouts, multi-page tables and handwritten notes. Schema-based, language-model extraction agents convert unstructured content into structured insights without training. Workflows can divide documents into logical sections and classify them using natural-language descriptions and rules. Chunking and embedding pipelines support indexing and retrieval in RAG workflows. Community integrations cover data loaders, agent tools, language models, vector stores, observability and application frameworks. LlamaCloud connectors currently include Google Drive, SharePoint, S3 and Confluence. Free and Starter plans allow five concurrent parse, extract, classify and split jobs; Pro allows 20 and Enterprise 100. The Free plan has no listed price; Starter costs $50.00 per month. LlamaParse is commercial, while LlamaIndex and Workflows are open-source.