Cognee
70Turns documents and past sessions into a graph-plus-vector memory that AI agents can query across runs.
Best for: Developers building agents that need recall across sessions
ai-for / rag
As of , EffectHub tracks 34 AI tools for RAG; 26 (76%) have a free tier, and paid plans run from $19 to $100 a month.
Cognee, Meilisearch and ChatBotKit lead the list on click-through. 28 of the 34 ship a public API.
ranked by click-through
Turns documents and past sessions into a graph-plus-vector memory that AI agents can query across runs.
Best for: Developers building agents that need recall across sessions
Open-source search engine with vector storage and hybrid keyword-plus-semantic retrieval, self-hosted or run as a cloud service
Best for: Teams that want keyword and semantic retrieval from one index instead of two systems
Hosted platform for building and deploying AI agents
Best for: Agencies shipping support or sales bots for multiple clients
Knowledge graph from Munich that links scattered enterprise data so engineers and models can query it with sources attached.
Best for: Aerospace, rail, and manufacturing engineering teams
Open-source visual builder for LLM agents and RAG flows, deployable as an HTTP API or an MCP server.
Best for: teams prototyping RAG and agent flows visually before coding them
Agent-building platform with a playground, visual workflow builder, agent marketplace and bring-your-own-model support, on web and mobile.
Best for: Development teams wanting a managed layer for building AI agents
Postgres backend bundled with a RAG pipeline, agent runtime and a visual workflow builder
Best for: Teams rebuilding the same Postgres plus RAG plus agent stack on every project
Open-source vector search engine written in Rust, available self-hosted or as a managed cloud for RAG and recommendation apps.
Best for: Teams building RAG or semantic search who want an open-source, self-hostable store
No-code platform for building and governing enterprise AI agents, sold through sales
Best for: Publishers and education companies with content-processing backlogs
Open-source search and vector engine that combines text, vectors, ranking and model inference for RAG, recommendations and agents.
Best for: Teams building large-scale search, recommendation or RAG systems that need hybrid ranking
Answers support tickets from your own historical ticket data
Best for: Ecommerce and SaaS support teams with thousands of resolved tickets and repetitive queries
Builds retrieval chatbots from company documents, sites and helpdesk content
Best for: Support teams turning an existing help centre into a self-serve answer bot
A serverless platform for building, deploying, and monitoring AI agents across 600-plus LLMs.
Best for: developers who want model routing, RAG, and workflows in one platform
Documentation service and MCP server that feeds version-specific library docs and code examples into AI coding assistants.
Best for: Developers using AI editors with frameworks that change often, such as Next.js or Supabase
Low-code builder for forkable AI workflows deployed to WhatsApp, SMS, voice lines, Slack and web widgets
Best for: NGOs and gov-tech teams shipping multilingual WhatsApp or IVR assistants
Turns your docs, tickets and wikis into a question-answering agent that cites its sources and answers inside Slack, Jira or Zendesk.
Best for: internal IT or HR helpdesks with a large document corpus
Open-source data framework for retrieval and agents, with LlamaParse as the paid document parsing, extraction and indexing service
Best for: Developers building retrieval-augmented answers over PDFs, contracts and reports with tables and scans
Managed MongoDB cloud database with built-in vector search, hybrid search and Voyage AI embeddings for RAG and agent apps.
Best for: Teams already on MongoDB adding RAG or semantic search
Source-available multimodal retrieval engine that embeds whole document pages, so RAG works over diagrams and datasheets.
Best for: Engineering and manufacturing teams searching technical manuals and datasheets
Managed vector database for similarity search over billions of embeddings, with serverless and BYOC options
Best for: RAG and agent memory backends that need low-latency retrieval at scale
Paid Node boilerplate for AI SaaS: auth, Stripe or Lemon Squeezy billing, RAG endpoints and demo apps
Best for: Solo developers shipping a first AI SaaS quickly
Private on-device AI assistant for chatting with your documents, running agents and transcribing meetings, free on desktop.
Best for: Privacy-conscious users who want chat with their documents without sending files to a cloud
Open-source canvas for building LLM workflows, agents and RAG pipelines, hosted or self-run
Best for: Teams that want to self-host an agent and RAG builder without writing the orchestration layer
Trains a support chatbot on your docs and help center, then embeds it on the site or in Slack
Best for: Support teams with existing documentation they want to make answerable
No-code agent-as-a-service platform that builds RAG-backed AI agents on your own documents, in the cloud or on-premise.
Best for: Teams building internal or customer-facing agents on private documents without an ML team
Paste your URL, it crawls the site and puts a conversion-focused chat agent on your pages.
Best for: single marketing sites that want a pre-sales chat agent
Apache-licensed Python framework for building RAG pipelines and agents out of swappable components, maintained by deepset.
Best for: Python teams building production RAG or search applications
MIT-licensed Python/JavaScript framework for building LLM agents, with 1,000+ model and tool integrations
Best for: Teams prototyping agents quickly against many models and tools
Open-source AI chat and search layer that connects any LLM to a company's apps, with permission-aware retrieval and self-hosting.
Best for: IT teams that must keep documents and embeddings inside their own network
AI search engine that answers questions with cited sources instead of a list of links.
Best for: People who want a direct answer with sources instead of scanning search results
Turns PDFs, scans, slides, emails and other messy files into clean structured data for RAG and LLM pipelines.
Best for: Developers preparing mixed document collections for RAG or fine-tuning
Open-source web app for asking questions about an uploaded PDF, built on Together AI and vector search.
Best for: Occasional PDF Q&A without paying for a subscription
Open-source Python toolkit that scores RAG and agent apps with LLM-based metrics and generates synthetic test sets.
Best for: Engineers measuring retrieval and answer quality of a RAG pipeline before release
Alani, a persistent agent that answers with citations over your files, a shared community library and business systems.
Best for: researchers keeping a cited personal library across mixed media
| Tool | Price | Free plan | API | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cognee | from $1/credit | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Meilisearch | from $20/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| ChatBotKit | from $25/mo | No | Yes | Active |
| Curiosity | On request | Not confirmed | Yes | Active |
| Langflow | Free | Yes | Yes | Active |
| OnDemand | On request | Not confirmed | Yes | Active |
| Powabase | from $25/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Qdrant | Not confirmed | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Quixl | On request | Not confirmed | Yes | Unstable |
| Vespa | Not confirmed | Yes | Yes | Active |
| CoSupport AI | from $99/mo | No | Yes | Active |
| CustomGPT.ai | from $99/mo | No | Yes | Active |
| Langbase | from $100/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Context7 | from $10/seat/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Gooey.AI | from $25/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Gurubase | On request | Not confirmed | Yes | Active |
| LlamaIndex | from $50/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| MongoDB Atlas | Not confirmed | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Morphik | from $59/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Pinecone | from $20/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| StartKit.AI | from $149 once | No | Yes | Active |
| AnythingLLM | from $50/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Dify | from $59/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| DocsBot | from $49/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Epsilla | from $29/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| Gista | from $19/mo | Yes | Not confirmed | Active |
| Haystack | Not confirmed | Yes | Yes | Active |
| LangChain | Free | Yes | Not confirmed | Active |
| Onyx | from $20/seat/mo | Yes | Yes | Active |
| ThinkAny | from $20/mo | Yes | Not confirmed | Unstable |
| Unstructured | Not confirmed | Yes | Yes | Active |
| PDFtoChat | Free | Yes | Not confirmed | Active |
| Ragas | Free | Yes | Not confirmed | Active |
| bundleIQ | from $20/mo | Yes | Not confirmed | Active |
Yes. 4 of the 34 AI tools for RAG on EffectHub's list are free to use — Langflow, LangChain, PDFtoChat and Ragas; 22 more have a free tier with paid upgrades.
As of October 27, 2026, paid plans for the 34 AI tools for RAG on EffectHub's list run from $19 to $100 a month. Each card shows the pricing model and the cheapest paid plan as EffectHub last verified it; 26 of the 34 can be started for free.
28 of the 34 AI tools for RAG on EffectHub's list ship a public API, including Cognee, Meilisearch, ChatBotKit and Curiosity. The API badge on each card is re-checked against the vendor's documentation.
For journalists, researchers and AI assistants: the figures on this page in one sentence you can quote.
As of October 27, 2026, EffectHub tracks 34 AI tools for RAG; 26 (76%) have a free tier, and paid plans run from $19 to $100 a month. (EffectHub, “RAG Tools & Platforms”, Oct 2026, https://effecthub.net/ai-for/rag)
Figures as of How we count
These figures are free to use under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page.