LangChain vs PrivateGPT
LangChain
langchain.comPrivateGPT
privategpt.devSide by side
| Figure | LangChain | PrivateGPT |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $39/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Retrieval-Augmented Generation Tools | 8.2 (#11) | 8.6 (#4) |
| Integrations | LangChain documents 1000+ integrations across chat and embedding models, tools and toolkits, document loaders, and vector stores. | Documented integration guides cover Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Claude for Microsoft 365, and OpenCode. |
| Observability | LangSmith can trace requests and help developers debug agent behavior and evaluate outputs from LangChain applications. | Optional observability can emit traces for LLM calls, embedding requests, and retrieval steps, with console, Arize Phoenix, and Opik backends documented. |
| Purpose | LangChain is an open-source framework that provides a pre-built agent architecture and integrations for models and tools. | PrivateGPT provides an open-source API layer for building private AI applications on your own infrastructure. |
| Support | The LangSmith Developer plan includes community support, while the Enterprise plan includes a support SLA. | The maker links to a community Discord for users. |
Plans
LangChain
- Developer (LangSmith)Free
- LangChain frameworkFree
- Plus (LangSmith)$39 a month
- Enterprise (LangSmith)Priced 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.
PrivateGPT
PrivateGPT is a free, open-source API layer for building private AI applications on your own infrastructure. It does not run models itself: it connects to a separate OpenAI-compatible inference server, which can be local or remote. The Messages API supports streaming, asynchronous processing, and token counting. Document workflows include file and artifact ingestion, retrieval with citations, and tools for querying databases and analyzing tabular data. The documented capabilities also include web search and extraction, code execution, custom tools, and MCP connectors. A browser workbench at `/ui` can be used for demos and inspecting API requests, but it stores chats and settings in browser localStorage and has no access control; the documentation describes it as a local demonstrator. PrivateGPT can be installed as a Python package, from source, or with Docker, and runs as a local server. Package installation requires Python 3.11; Python 3.10 and 3.12 or later are unsupported. Platforms include Linux, macOS, Windows, web, API, and self-hosted environments.