Side-by-Side Comparison
When to choose LlamaIndex
- ▸You need rich data connectors — LlamaIndex ships with 100+ loaders for PDFs, databases, APIs, and proprietary data sources.
- ▸Advanced index types (hierarchical, summary, knowledge graph) are important for your retrieval quality requirements.
- ▸LlamaCloud's managed ingestion and retrieval infrastructure reduces operational complexity for your team.
- ▸TypeScript support is required — LlamaIndex has a mature TS SDK alongside its Python core.
- ▸Your use case involves agentic query workflows where agents select retrieval strategies dynamically.
When to choose Haystack
- ▸Mature evaluation tooling is a priority — Haystack's BEIR integration and evaluation pipelines are industry-leading.
- ▸Strong pipeline abstractions with a declarative DSL suit teams that want composable, readable pipeline definitions.
- ▸deepset Cloud provides managed Haystack hosting for teams that want SaaS deployment without infrastructure management.
- ▸Your organisation operates primarily in European enterprise markets where Haystack has a well-established track record.
- ▸Document processing pipelines with strong preprocessing, OCR, and structured extraction are core requirements.
Find LlamaIndex and Haystack Agencies
When evaluating an AI agent agency's LlamaIndex versus Haystack expertise, ask specifically about their retrieval evaluation process: how do they measure retrieval precision and recall for your document type, and how do they iterate on chunking and indexing strategy? An agency with genuine depth will describe a systematic evaluation methodology, not just default to whichever framework they're most comfortable with.
Which has more agencies?
In our directory, there are currently 23 LlamaIndex agencies and 13 Haystack agencies. LlamaIndex leads the directory — reflecting its longer history and broader ecosystem adoption. However, Haystack agency numbers are growing as the framework matures.
Bottom line
LlamaIndex is the stronger choice for RAG-first agentic applications where data connectivity, index diversity, and query flexibility are paramount. Haystack excels in evaluation-centric NLP pipelines with deep enterprise roots, particularly in European markets. Both are production-ready; the decision often comes down to whether your priority is data ingestion breadth and agentic flexibility (LlamaIndex) or evaluation rigour and pipeline composability (Haystack).