Haystack alternatives

Haystack is listed under Agents: Open-source framework for RAG pipelines and agents. We compare it with 15 other Agents tools that have researched data. 15 of them offer a free plan or are free to use (4 open source), and 0 are paid only. Haystack itself is free and open source.

Order: 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.

Tool	Pricing	Free tier	Key features	Who it's for
Haystack this tool	Free and open source	Yes	Wire retrieval, reasoning, memory, and tools into agent flows Plug in OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Hugging Face, and vector databases Run serializable pipelines on Kubernetes with logging and monitoring	Teams and developers building LLM-powered agents and NLP applications.
Flowise	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers) Paid plans from $35/month	Yes	Build multi-agent systems with workflow orchestration across agents Build chatbots with tool calling and retrieval from data sources Let humans review tasks that agents perform	Developers and teams building AI agents and LLM workflows.
LearnHarness	Free and open source	Yes	Measures where understanding ends, then plans a dependency map from there to the goal Teaches one reasoning step at a time, then runs separate practice sessions Stores propositions and reasoning chains in a knowledge graph across sessions	People who want an agent to teach a subject from what they already understand.
Agno	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers) Paid plans from $150/month	Yes	Build agents, teams, and workflows using 100+ toolkits Expose agents as a product API or MCP server Run the platform in any cloud, on-prem, or locally	Engineers and teams who build customer-facing and internal agents in their own cloud.
CrewAI	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers)	Yes	Ranks automations from tickets, chats, apps, and workflows Visual editor builds workflows and exports them to Python Traces LLM calls, tool calls, and memory reads with costs	Business teams, engineers, and platform teams that build and govern agents.
E2B	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers) Paid plans from $150/month	Yes	One Linux microVM per agent session with shell and browser Run sandboxes on E2B cloud or AWS, GCP, or Azure Run Python or JavaScript and return charts, tables, and images	Teams that build and run AI agents.
Langfuse	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers) Paid plans from $29/month	Yes	Trace LLM calls, tool use, and retrieval steps Filter traces by user, session, cost, latency, or metadata Score outputs with model judges, rules, or human review	Developers building production AI agents and LLM applications.
LlamaIndex	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers)	Yes	Parse PDFs, Office files, spreadsheets, and images Extract tables, charts, and handwritten text into structure Pull defined fields from documents without model training	Developers and document-heavy teams in finance, insurance, manufacturing, and healthcare.
Mastra	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers) Paid plans from $250/month	Yes	Define typed agents with instructions, models, and tools Compose multi-step workflows with retries and branches Store context using observational memory and semantic recall	Developers and teams building AI agents and applications in TypeScript.
Modal	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers) Paid plans from $250/month	Yes	Serve language, image, video, and audio models live or in batch Run isolated sandboxes for coding agents and untrusted code Fine-tune models and run reinforcement learning on GPUs	For teams that develop, train, and serve AI applications at scale.
Agensh	Free and open source	Yes	Agents discover and claim sub-tasks, share findings, verify results, and merge progress Runs without a central orchestrator, using a shared workspace, messages, and shared context Published experiments scale the harness to 1,024 agents	Engineers reproducing a self-organized multi-agent harness on one machine.
Harness²	Free and open source	Yes	Task-level recursion proposes edits, probes them on the same task, and composes a harness Harnessing-level recursion keeps adopted harnesses and lessons for the next task Eight editable parts: system prompt, guardrails, memory, tool guidance, subagents, skills, scripts, and plugins	Engineers refining an agent harness for tasks unseen when that harness was designed.
OpenShell	Free and open source	Yes	Runs each agent in an isolated sandbox Confines files and system calls with kernel controls inside the sandbox Checks every network connection against policy before it leaves the sandbox	Teams that run fleets of autonomous agents and want policy on files, network, and credentials.
Omnara	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers) Platform fee $0; pay as you go for models and machines	Yes	Runs agents through one REST API, a TypeScript SDK, and a CLI Uses OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, LiteLLM, or a model you host Runs agents on sandboxes or on your own macOS or Linux machine	Teams who want to run production agents on their own models and machines.
Browserbase	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers) Paid plans from $20/month	Yes	Cloud browsers agents can drive to use websites Search for sites from a single query Fetch any URL as HTML, JSON, or markdown	Developers and companies building agents that browse and act on the web.
Dust	Freemium (free plan + paid tiers) Paid plans from 30€/seat/month	Yes	Connect agents to Slack, Notion, Drive, GitHub, Salesforce, and Zendesk Choose among 20+ models for each workflow Run multi-agent workflows on schedules and event triggers	Company teams that create, share, and run AI agents across their workflows.

Haystack alternatives: FAQ

What are the best Haystack alternatives?

Flowise, LearnHarness, Agno, CrewAI, E2B, Langfuse, LlamaIndex, Mastra, Modal, Agensh, Harness², OpenShell, Omnara, Browserbase, Dust are the Haystack alternatives in our directory that have researched data. They are ordered by how much you can use for free, then by documented features. No ratings or reviews are used, so the order is not a quality ranking.

Is there a free alternative to Haystack?

Flowise (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), LearnHarness (free and open source), Agno (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), CrewAI (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), E2B (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), Langfuse (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), LlamaIndex (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), Mastra (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), Modal (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), Agensh (free and open source), Harness² (free and open source), OpenShell (free and open source), Omnara (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), Browserbase (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)), Dust (freemium (free plan + paid tiers)). Haystack is itself free and open source, Free tiers can change, so check each site.