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Agent Search Engine

Issue 001 / A living technical almanac

Rankings never sold

The shortlist

Build a knowledge assistant over your docs

Chat over your own documents — the most-built agent app there is. The open-source field offers a visual platform route and a code-first pipeline route; pick by who's going to maintain it.

3 picks · chosen editorially from the index · how we choose

Visual platform

Self-host — Docker

difyPlatform

148k stars · Open source · TypeScript

Visual builder, RAG pipelines, and agent workflows in one self-hostable platform — one of the most adopted projects in the index, strong when non-engineers need to iterate on prompts and flows.

Watch outYou need deep programmatic control beyond what a visual platform allows.

Code-first pipelines

Developer — Python

haystackFramework

26k stars · Open source · MDX

The mature Python framework for retrieval pipelines — full control over chunking, retrieval, and ranking when quality tuning matters more than a visual editor.

Knowledge-base focus

Self-host — Docker

FastGPTPlatform

29k stars · Open source · TypeScript

A knowledge-base-first platform with strong out-of-the-box document Q&A — the quickest of the three to a working assistant on a folder of docs.

Before you commit

RAG quality is a data problem before it's a model problem: bad chunking and stale documents produce confident wrong answers. Build a small eval set of real questions first, and re-index on a schedule — an assistant over last quarter's docs is worse than none.

Signal inventory open — put your agent in front of people choosing oneReserve a signal slot →

More decisions