Haystack

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has revolutionized how large language models (LLMs) access external knowledge, reducing hallucinations and boosting accuracy in applications like chatbots, search engines, and enterprise AI.[1][2] In 2026, the ecosystem boasts mature open-source frameworks that streamline data ingestion, indexing, retrieval, and generation. This detailed guide ranks and compares the top RAG frameworks—LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, RAGFlow, and emerging contenders—based on features, performance, scalability, and real-world use cases.[2][3][4] We’ll dive into key features, pros/cons, code examples, and deployment tips, helping developers choose the right tool for production-grade RAG pipelines. ...

Introduction Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, and intelligent question-answering are now core building blocks of modern AI applications. But wiring together vector databases, file converters, retrievers, LLMs, and evaluation in a robust way is non‑trivial. Haystack, an open‑source Python framework by deepset, is designed to make this tractable: it gives you a full toolkit to ingest data, search it efficiently, query it with LLMs, run evaluation, and deploy to production. ...