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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Dera – A platform to manage chunks and embeddings for building RAG apps

Hi everyone, my cofounder and I built Dera - a platform to help manage chunks and embeddings. We built this because of the pain points we experienced while building RAG applications for side projects. The biggest pain point we encountered was that we were constantly trying out different chunking strategies, but there’s no easy way to check how the strategies are performing in terms of retrieval when given the same query. We tried searching for a tool for this but couldn’t find any (most LLM dev tools focus on prompts management). We hope this tool will be useful for people building RAG apps.…

Dera is a platform for managing chunks and embeddings in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications. It addresses the challenge of testing different chunking strategies by allowing developers to compare how… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Dera – A platform to manage chunks and embeddings for building RAG apps launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...

    2024 · embedding.io · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Ragas is an open-source library for evaluating and testing RAG and other LLM applications. Github: https://docs.ragas.io/en/stable/, docs: https://docs.ragas.io/. Ragas provides you with different sets of metrics and methods like synthetic test data generation to help you evaluate your RAG applications. Ragas started off by scratching our own itch for evaluating our RAG chatbots last year. Problems Ragas can solve - How do you choose the best components for your RAG, such as the retriever, reranker, and LLM? - How do you formulate a test dataset…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I've built an advanced RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline from scratch to demystify the complex mechanics of modern LLM-powered Question Answering systems. This repository features: -- An implementation of a sub-question query engine from scratch to answer complex user questions. -- Illustrative explanations that unveil the inner workings of the system. -- An analysis of the challenges I faced while working with the system, like prompt engineering and cost estimation. -- Qualitative comparison with similar frameworks like LlamaIndex, offering a broader perspective. Key Takeaway:…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hey HN, exciting news! Our RAG framework, Cognita (https://github.com/truefoundry/cognita), born from collaborations with diverse enterprises, is now open-source. Currently, it offers seamless integrations with Qdrant and SingleStore. In recent weeks, numerous engineers have explored Cognita, providing invaluable insights and feedback. We deeply appreciate your input and encourage ongoing dialogue (share your thoughts in the comments – let's keep this ‘open source’). While RAG is undoubtedly powerful, the process of building a functional application with it can feel…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey there HN! We’re Antonio, Luca, and Yuhang, and we’re excited to introduce Fast GraphRAG, an open-source RAG approach that leverages knowledge graphs and the 25 years old PageRank for better information retrieval and reasoning. Building a good RAG pipeline these days takes a lot of manual optimizations. Most engineers intuitively start from naive RAG: throw everything in a vector database and hope that semantic search is powerful enough. This can work for use cases where accuracy isn’t too important and hallucinations are tolerable, but it doesn’t work for more difficult queries that…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    RAGaaS▲75

    The API for building production-ready AI apps with your data

    2025 · sitegpt.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Ragas is an open-source library designed for evaluating and testing RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and other LLM applications. It offers a diverse set of metrics and methods, including synthetic test data generation, to help you assess your RAG applications. Ragas was initially developed to address our own needs for evaluating RAG chatbots last year. ### Problems Ragas Can Solve: - How can you select the best components for your RAG, such as the retriever, reranker, and LLM? - How can you create a test dataset without incurring significant expenses and time? We believe there's a need…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8IB

    Hey all! I wanted to share this project I've been working on that can maybe help you or your developer friends out. I built a RAG system for our product a while back and didn't realize how easy they were to get started. So I put together my learnings into this online course. It's not quite ready but if you sign up and mention HackerNews, I can get you early access. I'm looking to get feedback on the following: (1) materials — is it engaging & did you learn something? (2) UI/UX of the platform — did you have any issues that prevented you from starting or finishing the tutorial? (3)…

    2024 · takehomes.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I'm building LiquidIndex, an RAG API service that makes it easy to add personalized context to AI apps. Instead of building a whole system to upload, process, and search through a user’s files or notes, you just call a few APIs. It handles the hard parts - like connecting to Notion or Google Drive, breaking the data into usable pieces, and making it searchable. Then, when you want to answer a question using that data, you just query it, and it gives you the most relevant results - optionally with an LLM-generated answer. No pipelines, no infrastructure, no headaches. Here are the core APIs:…

    2025 · liquidindex.dev · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    RAGstack▲111

    Deploy a private ChatGPT alternative hosted within your VPC

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    TL;DR: Vector-based RAG performs poorly for many real-world applications like codebase chats, and you should consider 'language maps'. Part of our mission at Mutable.ai is to make it much easier for developers to build and understand software. One of the natural ways to do this is to create a codebase chat, that answer questions about your repo and help you build features. It might seem simple to plug in your codebase into a state-of-the-art LLM, but LLMs have two limitations that make human-level assistance with code difficult: 1. They currently have context windows that are too small to…

    2024 · twitter.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    ChunkHound’s goal is simple: local-first codebase intelligence that helps you pull deep, core-dev-level insights on demand, generate always-up-to-date docs, and scale from small repos to enterprise monorepos — while staying free + open source and provider-agnostic (VoyageAI / OpenAI / Qwen3, Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini / Grok, and more). I’d love your feedback — and if you have, thank you for being part of the journey!

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    Super RAG▲114

    Super performant RAG pipelines for AI apps

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    RAGLite is a Python package for building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. RAG applications can be magical when they work well, but anyone who has built one knows how much the output quality depends on the quality of retrieval and augmentation. With RAGLite, we set out to unhobble RAG by mapping out all of its subproblems and implementing the best solutions to those subproblems. For example, RAGLite solves the chunking problem by partitioning documents in provably optimal level 4 semantic chunks. Another unique contribution is its optimal closed-form linear query adapter…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15
    Linq▲35

    Build search engine for texts, images and beyond In 1 hour

    2023 · getlinq.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hi Hacker News! We’re Vadim and Chris from Highlight.io [1]. We do web app monitoring and are working on using LLMs/embeddings to add new functionality to our error monitoring product. Given that there’s a lot of founders/engineers using LLMs in their products, we figured we’d share how we built the new functionality, their impact on our workflows, and how you can try it out. Our goal was to build two features: (1) tagging errors (e.g. deeming an error as “authentication error” or a “database error”); and (2) grouping similar errors together (e.g. two errors that have a different…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hey hacker news, We’re the cofounders at Psychic.dev (http://psychic.dev) where we help companies connect LLMs to private data. With the launch of Llama 2, we think it’s finally viable to self-host an internal application that’s on-par with ChatGPT, so we did exactly that and made it an open source project. We also included a vector DB and API server so you can upload files and connect Llama 2 to your own data. The RAG in RAGstack stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation, a technique where the capabilities of a large language model (LLM) are augmented by retrieving information…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    I've been presenting at local meetups about Context Engineering, RAG, Skills, etc.. I even have a vbrownbag coming up on LinkedIn about this topic so I figured I would make a basic example that uses bedrock so I can use it in my talks or vbrownbags. Hopefully it's useful.

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Dive deep into AI Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

    2024 · ragaboutit.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20SA

    Hi HN, I’m Tullie, founder of Shaped. Previously, I was a researcher at Meta AI, worked on ranking for Instagram Reels, and was a contributor to PyTorch Lightning. We built ShapedQL because we noticed that while retrieval (finding 1,000 items) has been commoditized by vector DBs, ranking (finding the best 10 items) is still an infrastructure problem. To build a decent for you feed or a RAG system with long-term memory, you usually have to put together a vector DB (Pinecone/Milvus), a feature store (Redis), an inference service, and thousands of lines of Python to handle business logic…

    Jan 2026 · playground.shaped.ai · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hey HN, solo dev here. After years of frustration with how LLMs handle complex documents, especially PDFs with tables, I decided to build a solution myself. My approach uses a Markdown conversion step to preserve the table structure, which seems to work surprisingly well for chunking. This little parser is the first public piece of a much larger, privacy-focused AI platform I'm building. I'm pretty much running on fumes financially, so any feedback, critique, or support is massively appreciated. Happy to answer any questions about the approach!

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22QP

    Hey HN! We've just launched Quilt, a robust RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) UI that revolutionizes how you interact with your documents. Key features: - Multi-user setup with private/public document collections - Advanced hybrid RAG pipeline combining full-text & vector search - Smart citations with in-browser PDF preview and highlights - Fully customizable settings and prompts through the UI Making an account is free, no need to even use a strong password: this is only to ensure your documents are separate from the rest. We're keen to hear your thoughts and feedback. What features…

    2024 · quilt.fly.dev · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hi all! This morning, we released a new Apache 2.0 licensed model on HuggingFace for detecting hallucinations in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. What we've found is that even when given a "simple" instruction like "summarize the following news article," every LLM that's available hallucinates to some extent, making up details that never existed in the source article -- and some of them quite a bit. As a RAG provider and proponents of ethical AI, we want to see LLMs get better at this. We've published an open source model, a blog more thoroughly describing our methodology (and…

    2023 · vectara.com · its alternatives →

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