Haystack vs OpenRAG

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.

OpenRAG is a modular framework for building systems that answer questions using documents as their grounding. Its retrieval combines semantic search with BM25 keyword matching and multilingual reranking; answers cite a source document and page, with links to the cited location. Document processing covers listed text, office, email, audio, video, and image formats, with PDF layout awareness, OCR, image captioning, and audio transcription. The product includes an admin console, chat interface, and OpenAI-compatible API, and can connect to user-provided models or a hosted provider. Partition isolation, owner, editor, and viewer roles, plus token or OpenID Connect authentication, are among its access controls. It can run on infrastructure controlled by the deployer, keeping documents, embeddings, and queries within that environment. The self-hosted AGPL-3.0 edition is listed at free. Deployment prerequisites are Docker, Docker Compose, and at least 16 GB of RAM; a CPU-only profile is optional. CSV, ODT, and HTML support, tool calling, agentic RAG, MCP, and encryption in transit and at rest are listed as coming soon.