Dify vs Haystack vs LangChain vs LlamaIndex
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Dify
Open-source LLM app builder: workflows, agents, RAG, one canvas
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Haystack
Open-source orchestration framework from deepset for building producti...
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LangChain
Most popular framework for building LLM applications
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LlamaIndex
Framework for production retrieval-augmented generation
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.2 / 10 | 7.5 / 10 | 8.1 / 10 | 8 / 10 |
| Capability | — | |||
| Value for money | — | |||
| Ease of use | — | |||
| ASEAN readiness | — | |||
| API quality | — | |||
| Pricing | Open Source | Freemium | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | Sandbox plan: 200 message credits total (one-time trial, not monthly), 5 apps, 50 knowledge documents, 50 MB storage, 1 workspace member — free on Dify Cloud | Open-source framework (Apache-2.0) is free to self-host. | Open source framework is free; LangSmith has a free developer tier | — |
| Paid from | $59/month (Professional plan, billed monthly; annual billing saves $118/year) | Haystack Enterprise (paid) for governance, support, and scaling; contact deepset. | $39/month (LangSmith Plus) | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | Over 1.4 million machines (self-hosted), 180,000+ developers | 25K+ GitHub stars | 1m+ developers | — |
| Founded | 2023 | 2020 | 2022 | 2022 |
| Maker | — | deepset | Harrison Chase | — |
| Verdict | Dify's pitch has held up: a visual canvas for workflows, agents and RAG, backed by a fully open codebase you can self-host, with LangGenius's own $30M Series Pre-A in March 2026 proof the model works commercially too. Th... |
What this is for: Building production RAG, search, and agent pipelines with explicit, testable, modular components. Who this is for: Engineering teams that need control and observability over retrieval and generation, f... |
Still the default starting point for LLM apps, and meaningfully more stable since LangChain 1.0 and LangGraph 1.0 shipped in October 2025 — agents now run on LangGraph's durable runtime, and the team has promised no brea... |
LlamaIndex is a leading open-source data framework for connecting LLMs to private data — ingestion, indexing, retrieval, and increasingly agentic workflows. Alongside LangChain it is one of the two default choices for bu... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.