tools
Haystack Review 2026 — Production-Grade RAG Framework by deepset
Haystack by deepset is the open-source NLP framework for production RAG pipelines. Pipeline-as-YAML, 50+ integrations, built-in evaluation. Free Apache 2.0 license.
Haystack lets developers compose explicit pipelines from retrievers, routers, memory layers, tools, evaluators, and generators. It supports agents, retrieval-augmented generation, multimodal applications, semantic search, question answering, and text-to-SQL.
AI engineers, developers, and data scientists use it to build and deploy customizable AI systems. The open-source framework is free to run but does not include the managed infrastructure, governance, observability, or enterprise support available through Haystack Enterprise Platform.
Features
- Compose modular pipelines for retrieval, routing, memory, tools, evaluation, and generation
- Build multi-step AI agents with explicit tool invocation and reasoning logic
- Create advanced retrieval-augmented generation applications
- Support multimodal applications, semantic search, question answering, and text-to-SQL
- Swap models, providers, data stores, and infrastructure without rewriting applications
- Deploy in cloud or self-hosted environments
- Apache License 2.0 open-source framework
Use cases
- Build enterprise knowledge assistants grounded in internal documents
- Create RAG pipelines for search and question answering
- Develop agents that use tools, memory, and multi-step workflows
- Deploy semantic search across structured and unstructured data
- Test and evaluate AI pipelines before production deployment