LangChain vs OpenRAG
LangChain
langchain.comOpenRAG
open-rag.aiSide by side
| Figure | LangChain | OpenRAG |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $39/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 2 |
| Spec score · LLM Application Development Frameworks | 8.3 (#4) | 8.3 (#5) |
| Spec score · Retrieval-Augmented Generation Tools | 8.2 (#11) | 8.4 (#8) |
| Founded | 2023 | 2000 |
| Integrations | LangChain documents 1000+ integrations across chat and embedding models, tools and toolkits, document loaders, and vector stores. | The product documents compatibility with OpenAI API clients and names Open WebUI, LangChain, n8n and Twake.ai as integrations. |
| Notable limits | The Developer plan includes one seat and up to 5k base traces per month before pay-as-you-go charges apply. | The maker lists CSV, ODT, and HTML support, tool calling, agentic RAG, MCP, and encryption in transit and at rest as coming soon. |
| Purpose | LangChain is an open-source framework that provides a pre-built agent architecture and integrations for models and tools. | OpenRAG is a modular framework for building document-grounded retrieval-augmented generation systems. |
| Support | The LangSmith Developer plan includes community support, while the Enterprise plan includes a support SLA. | The product site directs technical questions to GitHub issues and links to documentation and a contact form. |
Plans
LangChain
- Developer (LangSmith)Free
- LangChain frameworkFree
- Plus (LangSmith)$39 a month
- Enterprise (LangSmith)Priced on request
OpenRAG
- OpenRAG (AGPL-3.0 self-hosted)Free
- Managed OpenRAG servicePriced on request
In their own words
LangChain
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.
OpenRAG
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.