Overview
Haystack is an open-source NLP framework by deepset for building production-ready search, question answering, and RAG systems. Unlike frameworks that emerged after ChatGPT, Haystack has been in development since before the LLM era, giving it a mature foundation for search and information retrieval that has been enhanced with modern LLM capabilities.
The framework excels at combining traditional NLP and search techniques with LLMs, making it particularly strong for hybrid systems. Haystack's pipeline architecture provides fine-grained control over every step of the retrieval and generation process, from document processing to answer generation.
Key Features
**Pipeline Architecture**: Flexible, composable processing pipelines**Hybrid Search**: Combines neural and keyword search**Document Processing**: Robust document parsing and chunking**Multi-Modal**: Support for text, tables, and images**Production Ready**: Battle-tested in enterprise deployments**Evaluation**: Built-in evaluation framework**Custom Components**: Easy to extend with custom nodes**Agent Support**: Basic agent and tool usage capabilitiesWhen to Use Haystack
Haystack is ideal for:
Production search and Q&A systemsEnterprise RAG applicationsHybrid search combining neural and keyword approachesApplications requiring robust document processingTeams migrating from traditional search to LLM-powered systemsProjects needing fine-grained pipeline controlPros
Mature framework with production track recordExcellent hybrid search capabilitiesStrong document processing pipelineEnterprise-ready and battle-testedGood evaluation toolsActive development by deepsetComprehensive documentationFlexible pipeline architectureCons
More complex setup than newer frameworksPipeline architecture has learning curveLess trendy than LangChain/LlamaIndexSmaller community than top frameworksAgent capabilities less developedSome legacy API patternsRequires more boilerplate than simpler frameworksPricing
**Open Source**: Free, Apache 2.0 license**deepset Cloud**: Managed platform, pricing on request**Enterprise**: Custom support and features