deepset

deepset is behind Haystack, an open-source framework with more than 26,000 GitHub stars for building retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, AI agents and semantic search — the same territory as LangChain and LlamaIndex, but maintained by a Berlin company rather than a US one.

Where Rasa in this category is a framework for managing a conversation's business logic, Haystack is a framework for grounding an assistant in your own documents and data sources, with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory and generation rather than a black-box pipeline.

On top of the open-source core sits the Haystack Enterprise Platform (for a time marketed as the deepset AI Platform), a visual pipeline builder with role-based access control, audit logs, guardrails and a playground for testing before production, deployable in the cloud or self-hosted for teams that need to keep infrastructure in-house. deepset markets it explicitly as "the platform for Sovereign AI," and the company holds SOC 2 Type II certification.

Contracts for customers outside the US run through deepset GmbH in Berlin under German law, with Berlin courts, rather than through its New York office.

The free Studio tier covers one workspace, one user, 100 pipeline hours and 50 files — enough to build a prototype, not to run a team on.

Beyond that, deepset publishes no self-serve pricing at all; every Enterprise plan is quoted individually, which is friction for a small team comparing options against Dust's published €30 per seat. And unlike Rasa's dialogue-management focus, Haystack assumes you already know what "retrieval" and "pipeline" mean — this is a tool for a development team, not a business user configuring a bot in an afternoon.

What deepset does well

• Haystack framework is free, open source and Apache 2.0
• More than 26,000 GitHub stars and active development
• Cloud or self-hosted deployment for data sovereignty
• RBAC, audit logs and guardrails built into the Enterprise Platform
• SOC 2 Type II certified

Where deepset falls short

• No published Enterprise pricing; every plan is quoted
• Free Studio tier is a prototype limit, not production-ready
• Requires developers; not a no-code bot builder like Rasa or Dust
• Also operates from New York, so not EU-only

Standout feature. An open-source RAG framework with 26,000+ GitHub stars, built by a Berlin company rather than a Silicon Valley one.