Haystack vs txtai
Haystack
haystack.deepset.aitxtai
neuml.github.ioSide by side
| Figure | Haystack | txtai |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · LLM Application Development Frameworks | 8.2 (#7) | 8.3 (#6) |
| Spec score · Retrieval-Augmented Generation Tools | 8.2 (#10) | 8.3 (#9) |
| Deployment | Pipelines can be served as REST APIs or MCP servers with Hayhooks and run on your own infrastructure. | txtai API instances and workflows can run locally, on a server, on a cluster, or serverless; documented serverless options include AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Cloud Functions, and Kubernetes with Knative. |
| Integrations | The integrations directory lists 189 integrations, including model providers, vector databases, monitoring tools, and community-built components. | The documentation describes agent support for Hugging Face and llama.cpp models, and OpenAI, Claude, and AWS Bedrock through LiteLLM. |
| Support | deepset offers private, secure engineering support, deployment guides, and flexible services for Haystack framework customers. | NeuML offers implementation guidance, development support, and AI consulting, with meetings or email as contact options. |
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.
txtai
txtai is an open-source framework for semantic search, language-model orchestration, and language-model workflows. Its embeddings database brings together sparse and dense vector indexes, graph networks, and relational databases. It supports vector search with SQL, object storage, topic modeling, graph analysis, and multimodal indexing, and can create embeddings from text, documents, audio, images, and video. Pipelines cover prompts, question answering, labeling, transcription, translation, and summarization; workflows combine pipelines with business logic, while agents can coordinate embeddings, pipelines, workflows, and other agents. Web and Model Context Protocol APIs are available, alongside JavaScript, Java, Rust, and Go bindings. txtai can run locally or be deployed on a server, cluster, or serverless environment. Install with pip or use Docker; Python 3.11 or later is supported. The software is free under the Apache 2.0 license. The API is open over HTTP by default, with HTTPS and token authorization options documented.