AI & Automation · AI Development & Evaluation

RAG Tools

9 paid against 13 free you can run yourself.

Paid against free › AI & Automation › AI Development & Evaluation › RAG Tools · AI and models on Repo Radar

RAG tools let AI answer questions from your own documents: they parse and chunk the content, index it, retrieve the right passages and pass them to a model, ideally with citations. The paid options range from developer APIs that handle the whole pipeline (Ragie, Pinecone Assistant, Morphik) and document parsing services (LlamaCloud, Unstructured) to enterprise platforms with private deployment (Vectara, Contextual AI, Progress Agentic RAG) and no-code chatbots (CustomGPT). On the open-source side RAGFlow, LightRAG, Serviette and AnythingLLM are complete systems you can self-host, GraphRAG adds knowledge graphs, LlamaIndex and Haystack are frameworks, and Docling and Chonkie handle parsing and chunking. Marks come from vendor pricing pages and project READMEs as of 19 October 2026; nothing was tested hands-on.

Free 13 direct · 27 related

Free to use. You run it on your own server.

Direct alternatives

They do this job.

RAinfiniflow/ragflow

RAGFlow is a leading open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) engine that fuses cutting-edge RAG with Agent capabilities to create a superior context layer for LLMs

★ 92.5kFree
ANMintplex-Labs/anything-llm

One program that reads your documents and answers questions about them, with the model running locally if you want.

★ 67.2kFree
SEpathwaycom/serviette

A no-code RAG server that keeps answers in sync with your documents. Works with 8 vector databases. Built on Pathway.

★ 58.8kFree
LLrun-llama/llama_index

LlamaIndex is the document processing platform for AI

★ 52.6kFree
HIvectorize-io/hindsight

A memory store for AI agents that keeps what matters across sessions instead of replaying the whole history.

★ 49.4kFree
LIHKUDS/LightRAG

A retrieval system that builds a network of things and relationships out of documents, then answers questions against it.

★ 40.1kFree
GRmicrosoft/graphrag

A pipeline that builds a knowledge graph from documents and answers questions from nested cluster summaries.

★ 36.3kFree
HAdeepset-ai/haystack

Open-source AI orchestration framework for building context-engineered, production-ready LLM applications. Design modular pipelines and agent workflows with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory, and generation. Built for scalable agents, RAG, multimodal applications, semantic search, and conversational systems.

★ 26.8kFree
CHfeyninc/chonkie

Focused text-chunking library — semantic and recursive splitters that respect message boundaries, so subtopics come out clean.

★ 4.7kFree
MOmorphik-org/morphik-core

Open-source multimodal retrieval engine (Morphik Core)

★ 3.7kFree
REAnswerDotAI/rerankers

One interface in front of every common reranking model, so swapping one for another is a one-word change.

★ 1.6kFree
VIMinishLab/vicinity

A small Python library giving one interface over several nearest-neighbour search methods.

★ 351Free
TOTutteInstitute/toponymy

A library that writes readable names for groups of text, at every level of a tree.

★ 106Free

Related alternatives

A second choice: they cover part of this job or are a building block for it.

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DIlanggenius/dify

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LAlangflow-ai/langflow

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FAfacebookresearch/faiss

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DSstanfordnlp/dspy

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ONonyx-dot-app/onyx

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PGpgvector/pgvector

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COcoze-dev/coze-studio

An AI agent development platform with all-in-one visual tools, simplifying agent creation, debugging, and deployment like never before. Coze your way to AI Agent creation.

★ 21.7kFree
DEconfident-ai/deepeval

Tests for language-model output, written and run like ordinary unit tests.

★ 18.8kFree
LILibreTranslate/LibreTranslate

Self-hosted machine-translation API — removes the per-character meter from running a bilingual site.

★ 17.1kFree
RAvibrantlabsai/ragas

Scores how good a retrieval-based AI answer is, so a change can be shown to have helped or hurt.

★ 15.7kFree
LMEleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness

Runs standard question sets against a language model and reports the scores.

★ 14.3kFree
PRmicrosoft/promptflow

Build high-quality LLM apps - from prototyping, testing to production deployment and monitoring.

★ 11.3kFree
OPtraceloop/openllmetry

Open-source observability for your GenAI or LLM application, based on OpenTelemetry

★ 7.5kFree
NENVIDIA/NeMo-Guardrails

Puts rules you write around a language model's input and output, and enforces them before the answer reaches anybody.

★ 7.2kFree
LMlmnr-ai/lmnr

Laminar - open-source observability platform purpose-built for AI agents. YC S24.

★ 3.4kFree
COcheshire-cat-ai/core

A ready-made assistant service with document search, a plugin system and a chat connection included.

★ 3.1kFree
PGtimescale/pgvectorscale

A PostgreSQL add-on that makes similarity search work on more data than fits in memory.

★ 3.1kFree
WTsegment-any-text/wtpsplit

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★ 1.4kFree
GEAuriti-Labs/geo-optimizer-skill

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★ 1.1kFree
SEMinishLab/semhash

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★ 975Free

Feature by feature

Every paid tool and free repository we compared, marked against the same features.

✓has itPartlysome plans or extra work—confirmed not available?not confirmed✓the vendor's claim onlypricingClick a mark for its note and source

Paid · 9Free · 10
Featureinfiniflow/ragflowMintplex-Labs/anything-llmmicrosoft/graphragHKUDS/LightRAGrun-llama/llama_indexdeepset-ai/haystackmorphik-org/morphik-corefeyninc/chonkiedocling-project/doclingpathwaycom/serviette
Starts at$100K per year (SaaS)$100 per month (Starter)Starter: 40K included credits plus pay-as-you-go up to $500 per month$20 per month flat (Builder)On-demand, usage-based$0.015 per page after the first 10,000$700 per month (Starter)$59 per month (2,000 pages)$99 per month (Standard)Apache-2.0MITMITMITMITApache-2.0BSLMITMITMIT
Ingestion
Document parsingTurns PDFs, Office files and scans into clean text and tables.
ChunkingSplits documents into retrievable pieces.
Retrieval
Hybrid searchCombines keyword and vector search.
RerankingReorders retrieved passages by relevance before answering.
Knowledge graph retrievalBuilds and searches a graph of entities and relations.
Answers
Answers with citationsAnswers point to the source passages they came from.
Ingestion
Data connectorsPulls content from sources such as Google Drive, Notion, S3 or Confluence.
Images, audio or videoIndexes content beyond text.
Deployment
Managed hostingThe vendor runs the service for you.
Self-hosting or VPCRun it on your own servers or in your cloud account.
Local modelsWorks with locally run models, for example through Ollama.
Integration
MCP serverExposes retrieval to AI agents over the Model Context Protocol.
Answers
Agents or agentic retrievalAgents plan multi-step retrieval or act on the results.
Governance
Document access permissionsRespects who may see which documents.
Pricing
Free tierA free plan or free credits to start.
Usage-based pricingPriced per page, credit or query rather than only per seat.

Excluded candidates

Looked at, and left out of the comparison, with the reason.

Paid apps

  • GraphlitGraphlit is winding down: its pricing page says new sign-ups are closed and existing accounts stay available only during the transition.Source
  • NeedleNeedle's pricing page now sells lead-list building from LinkedIn, Instagram and Places at $69 per connected account, not a RAG service.Source

Repositories

  • TutteInstitute/toponymyToponymy names the topics found in clustered document collections. It is a small topic-labelling library with about 100 stars rather than a retrieval tool.Source
  • MinishLab/vicinityVicinity is a lightweight nearest-neighbour search library with flexible backends. It is a vector-search component, closer to vector databases than to RAG systems.Source
  • AnswerDotAI/rerankersrerankers offers one API for common reranking models. It is a single retrieval component and has had no push since 20 December 2025.Source
  • vectorize-io/hindsightHindsight is agent memory that learns from past interactions. It is an agent-memory product rather than retrieval over a document collection.Source
  • SciPhi-AI/R2RR2R is a production retrieval system with agentic RAG, but it has had no push since 7 November 2025, so actively developed engines were preferred.Source
  • Cinnamon/kotaemonKotaemon is an open RAG tool for chatting with documents. It overlaps AnythingLLM, which is more active, and has had no push since 14 July 2026.Source
  • neuml/txtaitxtai is an all-in-one framework for semantic search and LLM orchestration. It overlaps Haystack and LlamaIndex, which are more widely used for RAG.Source
  • weaviate/VerbaVerba was Weaviate's RAG chatbot; the repository is archived, with its last push on 8 June 2026.Source
  • HKUDS/RAG-AnythingRAG-Anything is an all-in-one multimodal RAG framework from the same lab as LightRAG (G4) and builds on it, so LightRAG represents the family here.Source
  • VectifyAI/PageIndexPageIndex is a vectorless, reasoning-based document index. It is a promising alternative retrieval method but narrower than the full RAG engines selected.Source
  • llmware-ai/llmwarellmware is a framework for enterprise RAG pipelines with small models. It overlaps Haystack and LlamaIndex, which have larger communities.Source
  • langchain-ai/langchainLangChain now describes itself as an agent engineering platform. It can build RAG but is a general agent framework, better compared with agent frameworks.Source

Gaps

What the research could not settle from the vendors' own pages.

What vendors don't publish

  • RAG vendors bill in different units (pages, credits, tokens, queries, storage) and do not convert them, so the cost of answering questions over the same documents cannot be compared without a trial.Ragie, LlamaIndex, Unstructured, Progress Agentic RAG, Morphik, CustomGPT.ai · checked 2026-10-19 · source 1 · source 2 · source 3 · source 4
  • Pinecone's pricing page shows database plans and says its examples exclude Assistant usage, so the cost of Pinecone Assistant itself is not visible on the plan cards.Pinecone Assistant · checked 2026-10-19 · source 1
  • Progress Agentic RAG prices its plans by an allowance of "tokens" per month without explaining what one token covers, so the $700 and $1,925 plans are hard to size.Progress Agentic RAG · checked 2026-10-19 · source 1

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