OpenRAG vs Vellum
OpenRAG
open-rag.aiVellum
vellum.aiSide by side
| Figure | OpenRAG | Vellum |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $30/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 9 |
| Spec score · LLM Application Development Frameworks | 8.3 (#5) | 8.6 (#2) |
| Audience | The site describes use for AI assistants, legal search and multimodal enterprise question answering, and says public administrations and private companies use it. | Vellum characterizes the product as a personal assistant rather than a team or shared company tool. |
| Integrations | The product documents compatibility with OpenAI API clients and names Open WebUI, LangChain, n8n and Twake.ai as integrations. | OAuth integrations include GitHub, Notion, Linear, Airtable, Spotify, Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, and other services, while MCP servers provide additional tools. |
| Product | OpenRAG is a modular framework for building document-grounded retrieval-augmented generation systems. | Vellum describes itself as a personal AI assistant that can read files, manage calendars, send email, run code, and control a computer. |
| Support | The product site directs technical questions to GitHub issues and links to documentation and a contact form. | Vellum lists support contact as [email protected]. |
Plans
OpenRAG
- OpenRAG (AGPL-3.0 self-hosted)Free
- Managed OpenRAG servicePriced on request
Vellum
- BaseFree
- FreeFree
- Mighty$30 a month
- Mighty$30 a month
- Custom$50 a month
- Super$100 a month
- Super$100 a month
- Ultra$200 a month
- Ultra$200 a month
In their own words
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.
Vellum
Vellum is a personal AI assistant that can read files, manage calendars, send email, run code, and control a computer. It saves preferences and context in its workspace for later conversations, and users can create, install, and manage skills. Listed OAuth services include Discord, GitHub, Google services, HubSpot, Linear, Twitter (X), Asana, Notion, Microsoft Outlook, and Todoist. Vellum says OAuth tokens stay in a credential vault rather than being exposed to the language model. Sensitive actions prompt for approval, and users can set trust rules for standing permissions. By default, conversation context is sent to Anthropic to generate responses; OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, Fireworks, and local Ollama are listed alternatives. An internet connection is required. Vellum Cloud runs assistants in isolated environments with private storage and 24/7 availability. The Free plan includes first tasks and pay-as-you-go credits. Mighty costs $30 a month, Super $100 a month, and Ultra $200 a month. There is no shipped Linux desktop client, but Linux users can use the web app, Chrome extension, or self-host the runtime.