Best Haystack Alternatives & Competitors

Unstructured is the leading data ingestion platform for AI applications, transforming unstructured data—PDFs, Word documents, HTML, images, emails—into clean, structured formats ready for LLM consumption and RAG pipelines. The platform handles document parsing, OCR, table extraction, and chunking with high accuracy. Available as open-source and a managed API service, Unstructured is used by enterprises to prepare large document corpora for AI processing.

LlamaIndex (formerly GPT Index) is a data framework for connecting LLMs with external data sources. It provides connectors for 160+ data sources, document parsers, indexing strategies, and query engines that make it easy to build RAG applications. LlamaIndex supports advanced retrieval patterns including recursive retrieval, knowledge graphs, and multi-document agents. The LlamaCloud managed service handles document ingestion and parsing at scale.

Vision-first document parsing using VLMs. Extracts complex tables, charts, and layouts from PDFs.

Carbon, acquired by Perplexity in December 2024, provided pre-built data connectors for ingesting unstructured data from 25+ sources into LLM applications. Its managed API was wound down in March 2025, with its technology now integrated into Perplexity's enterprise data connectivity stack. Carbon's connectors supported Google Drive, Notion, Slack, Confluence, and other popular data sources for RAG pipelines.

Vectara is a RAG-as-a-service platform that provides end-to-end retrieval-augmented generation through a single API. It handles document ingestion, chunking, embedding, retrieval, reranking, and generation—with built-in hallucination detection and citation extraction—without requiring developers to manage any RAG infrastructure.

End-to-end open-source RAG engine with server, API, and pipeline pre-built. RAG to Riches.

Docling is IBM's open-source document conversion toolkit that transforms PDFs, DOCX, PPTX, and other document formats into structured JSON or markdown. It uses advanced layout analysis and table structure recognition to preserve document structure, making it ideal for preparing documents for RAG and LLM applications. Docling integrates with LlamaIndex and LangChain for seamless pipeline construction.

Chunkr is a document parsing and chunking service optimized for RAG pipelines. It handles PDFs, images, tables, and complex document layouts, producing clean structured output ready for embedding and retrieval. Chunkr focuses on the critical pre-processing step that determines RAG quality.

WhyHow provides tools for building and querying knowledge graphs from unstructured text using LLMs.