Haystack vs OpenHands

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.

OpenHands is an open-source platform for creating and operating AI coding agents. It offers a terminal or CLI, a shared web interface, and an SDK for building agents and coordinating workflows in code. Automations can start agents in response to activity on GitHub, Slack, Jira, or Linear, on schedules, and through supported integrations. Described engineering tasks include reviewing pull requests, triaging issues, investigating incidents, and opening pull requests with suggested fixes. OpenHands supports agent stacks including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Gemini CLI, as well as other stacks, closed models, and open weights. It can run locally, in the cloud, or in an organization’s VPC; enterprise customers can self-host on Kubernetes. Enterprise controls include runtime isolation, secret and tool permissions, audit logs, prompt-injection detection with automatic halting, and governance tools such as RBAC, reporting, budgeting, and an LLM gateway. The free Open Source plan lists one user and unlimited daily conversations; Individual lists one user and 10 daily conversations. Enterprise lists unlimited users and conversations. An early-preview Agent Canvas desktop app supports macOS, Windows, and Linux.