Haystack vs LlamaIndex

Haystack: Open-source framework for RAG pipelines and agents. LlamaIndex: Framework for connecting data to language models and agents.

Pricing, free tier, and features on this page come from each tool's own site. Google autocomplete (suggestqueries.google.com, client=firefox, hl=en) for "<tool> vs", fetched 2026-10-14; a pair is kept when the suggestion appears from both sides (2+ hits). Sorted by how much you can use for free (free or open source first, then free plan with paid tiers, then paid only), then by the number of documented features, then alphabetically. No ratings or reviews are used. Read the comparison methodology. How benchmark evidence is labeled.

	Haystack	LlamaIndex
What it is	Open-source framework for RAG pipelines and agents.	Framework for connecting data to language models and agents.
Category	Agents	Agents
Pricing	Free and open source	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers)
Free tier	Yes	Yes
Who it's for	Teams and developers building LLM-powered agents and NLP applications.	Developers and document-heavy teams in finance, insurance, manufacturing, and healthcare.
Key features	Wire retrieval, reasoning, memory, and tools into agent flows	Parse PDFs, Office files, spreadsheets, and images
	Plug in OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Hugging Face, and vector databases	Extract tables, charts, and handwritten text into structure
	Run serializable pipelines on Kubernetes with logging and monitoring	Pull defined fields from documents without model training
	Build RAG using hybrid retrieval and self-correction loops	Classify documents and split them using plain-language rules
	Process images and transcribe audio alongside text	Chunk and embed files for search and retrieval
Website	haystack.deepset.ai	www.llamaindex.ai

Data comes from each tool's homepage and pricing page. Pair chosen from search suggestions (llamaindex vs haystack; haystack vs llamaindex).