RAGFlow
Self-hosted RAG engine that focuses on layout-aware document parsing, editable chunks and cited answers.
About
InfiniFlow's engine puts most of its effort into the parsing step that many RAG stacks treat as an afterthought. Its DeepDoc component reads page layouts, runs OCR and reconstructs tables in PDFs, Word files, slides, spreadsheets, scans and web pages, then splits content with selectable chunking templates; you can inspect chunks visually and correct them by hand after parsing, and every answer cites the chunks it used. On top come agentic retrieval with adjustable reasoning depth, prebuilt agent templates, knowledge compilation into wikis, graphs, mind maps or timelines, and connectors reaching sources like BigQuery or sitemaps. The 1.0 release candidate moved the services to Go. Deployment is a Docker Compose stack with Elasticsearch or Infinity as the document store; plan on four cores, 16 GB of memory and 50 GB of disk to start. In the web interface you register your own chat, embedding and reranking providers, hosted or local, as no LLM is bundled. An optional code sandbox needs gVisor when self-managed. Code is Apache-2.0, and a hosted cloud edition exists. It fits document-heavy assistants that must show their sources.
Should you use RAGFlow?
Pick it when
Pick RAGFlow when answers live in messy business documents such as long PDFs, Word files, and spreadsheets, and you need template-based chunking you can inspect visually plus chunk-level citations users can verify.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it for a quick personal setup, since it runs as a self-hosted Docker server rather than a desktop app; AnythingLLM is lighter. If pages are mostly charts and diagrams, Morphik's visual retrieval may beat text parsing.
Alternatives to RAGFlow
- Kotaemon
Lighter document QA web UI with hybrid and multimodal retrieval, easier to extend in code, with less elaborate parsing templates.
- AnythingLLM
Desktop installer, or multi-user workspaces on Docker, for fast rollout, with less control over how documents are parsed and chunked.
- Onyx
Focused on connecting 50+ company sources with agents and web search, broader reach where RAGFlow goes deeper on parsing each file.
- Docling
MIT parsing library for layout and tables that you embed in your own pipeline, rather than a complete engine with UI and agents.
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Details
- Category
- RAG & Document Retrieval
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Easy (2/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026