AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Multi-modal RAG with ColQwen in a single line of Code

Hi HN, we're Arnav and Adi, and we're building DataBridge - a multi-modal database built from the ground up with AI use cases in mind. We recently launched support for ColPali-style image embeddings and late-interaction retrieval. We've implemented a hamming distance version of retrieval which helps this approach scale significantly more when compared with the regular late-interaction similarity scoring. These embeddings provide a significantly better retrieval accuracy, with ColQwen achieving around an 89% average score on the ViDoRe benchmark, compared to around 67% for traditional parsing…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1
FastGraphRAG – Better RAG using good old PageRank▲457
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 →
2
Vectorize 2.0▲335
Complete RAG agents (chatbot, MCP) with little or no code
2025 · platform.vectorize.io · its alternatives →
3IB
In-Browser Graph RAG with Kuzu-WASM and WebLLM▲158
We show the potential of modern, embedded graph databases in the browser by demonstrating a fully in-browser chatbot that can perform Graph RAG using Kuzu (the graph database we're building) and WebLLM, a popular in-browser inference engine for LLMs. The post retrieves from the graph via a Text-to-Cypher pipeline that translates a user question into a Cypher query, and the LLM uses the retrieved results to synthesize a response. As LLMs get better, and WebGPU and Wasm64 become more widely adopted, we expect to be able to do more and more in the browser in combination with LLMs, so a lot of…
2025 · blog.kuzudb.com · its alternatives →
4
How we leapfrogged traditional vector based RAG with a 'language map'▲162
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 →
5IM
I made a website to semantically search ArXiv papers▲324
As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…
2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech · its alternatives →
6
Demystifying Advanced RAG Pipelines▲131
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 →
7
Fast vector similarity using Rust and Python▲141
I recently found myself computing the similarity between lots of very high dimensional vectors (i.e., sentence embedding vectors from LLMs), and I wanted to try some more powerful measures of similarity/dependency than just Cosine similarity, which seems to be the default for everything nowadays because of its computational efficiency. There are many other more involved measures that can detect more subtle relationships, but the problem is that some of them are quite slow to compute, especially if you're trying to do it in Python. For my favorite measure of statistical dependency,…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
LinkingMem — Graph-native RAG Engine▲11
LinkingMem — Graph-native RAG Engine
Jun 2026 · its alternatives →
9
DataBridge - An open-source, modular, multi-modal RAG solution▲5
For the past few weeks, I've been working on DataBridge, an open-source solution for easy data ingestion and querying. We support text, PDFs, images, and as of recently, we've added a video parser that can analyze and work well over frames and audio. We are also adding object tracking to improve video ingestion and context, and plan to do this for various data types. To get started, you can find the installation section in our docs at https://databridge.gitbook.io/databridge-docs/getting-starte.... There are a bunch of other useful functions and examples available there.…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
10
Superlinked – Vector Embeddings for Structured and Unstructured Data▲7
Hi HN, I'm Daniel from Superlinked! We have built an open-source framework that improves vector search relevance and usefulness by combining structured metadata with unstructured data in your embeddings. We included self-hostable API server that sits between your data sources and vector database. Docs: https://docs.superlinked.com/ We're launching our cloud offering soon where you can use Superlinked to orchestrate high-performance retrieval for RAG, Search & Recommendation apps in your own cloud. Looking for feedback and happy to answer questions!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
LinkingMem - v0.3.0▲10
LinkingMem — Graph-native RAG Engine
Jul 2026 · linking-mem.vercel.app · its alternatives →
12
A working reference implementation of context engineering▲46
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 →
13
I built an offline open-source RAG system DataBridge▲7
Hey HN! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on DataBridge, an open-source solution for data ingestion and querying across text, PDFs, images, and videos. In our latest update, we’ve added a fully local deployment option: - No internet required – Runs entirely offline. - Customizable Models – Supports any LLM and embedding model via Ollama (with options for any other private providers) - Extensibility – You can plug in your own models or tools easily. This local-first approach ensures better privacy, security, and flexibility, especially for teams dealing with sensitive data. You can…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
Interactively explore your Hugging Face dataset with one line of code▲7
Hey HN, when building ML systems for industrial AI, we have learned that data inspection is critical during the ML development process. We are also big fans of the Hugging Face ecosystem. That is why we built an integration to our data exploration tool Spotlight that allows you to interactively explore Hugging Face datasets with one line of code. Spotlight lets you leverage model results such as predictions and embeddings to gain a deeper understanding in data segments and model failure modes. Currently, many many NLP, CV, Audio and multimodal datasets are supported both locally and on the…
2023 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
15
Model2vec – Lightning-fast Static Embeddings for RAG/Semantic Search▲28
We’ve recently open-sourced Model2vec, a method to distill sentence transformers into static embeddings that outperform all previous approaches by a large margin on MTEB. Our new models set a new state-of-the-art for static embeddings. Main features: - Our best model (potion-base-8M) has only 8M parameters, which is ~30mb on disk - Inference is ~500x faster than the distilled base model (bge-base), on a CPU - New models can be distilled in 30 seconds on a CPU without requiring a dataset - just a vocabulary - Numpy-only inference: The packaged can be install the package with minimal…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
Synapsis - Vectorisation as a Service▲30
We connect visual data to AI applications.
2024 · quasara.io · its alternatives →
17
Tonic Validate Metrics – an open-source RAG evaluation metrics package▲40
Hey HN, Joe and Ethan from Tonic.ai here. We just released a new open-source python package for evaluating the performance of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Earlier this year, we started developing a RAG-powered app to enable companies to talk to their free-text data safely. During our experimentation, however, we realized that using such a new method meant that there weren’t industry-standards for evaluation metrics to measure the accuracy of RAG performance. We built Tonic Validate Metrics (tvalmetrics, for short) to easily calculate the benchmarks we needed to meet in…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
18PF
Playground for comparing embedding models on Wikipedia+book retrieval▲5
Introducing embeds.ai: an embedding playground to compare how embedding models work on a real world use case (retrieval augmented generation for Wikipedia articles + Elad Gil's High growth handbook) A few weeks ago, Shreyan and I were looking for an embedding model to use for RAG. We eventually came across the MTEB leaderboard, but we struggled to understand the benchmark scores. We wanted a tool to test various embedding models with example queries on real-world datasets. After unsuccessfully looking for such a “playground”, we decided to just build one ourselves! We embedded HuggingFace’s…
2023 · embeds.ai · its alternatives →
19
We built a better reranker and open sourced it▲6
Hi HN, Our research team just released the best performing and most efficient reranker out there, and it's available now as an open weight model on HuggingFace. Reranker v2 was designed specifically for agentic RAG, supports instruction following (our v1 was the first to introduce this), and is multilingual. Along with this, we're also open source our eval set, which allows you to reproduce our benchmark results. By releasing these datasets, we are also advancing instruction-following reranking evaluation, where high-quality benchmarks are currently limited. Please give it a try and let us…
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
20IB
I built a browser-based tutorial for learning RAG for LLMs▲25
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 →
21
Rag Framework▲5
A scalable centralized embeddings platform for efficient embedding and retrieval to build RAG applications faster
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
RAGLite – A Python package for the unhobbling of RAG▲19
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 →
23IM
I'm building an API that allows you to train semantic search for RAGs▲6
When your embedding provider is good, but could be better for your use-case.
2024 · zoplabs.com · its alternatives →
24
A benchmark + latency sim for LLM db queries: ClickHouse / Postgres▲12
Performance comparison of ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL using LLM-style query patterns on realistic aircraft tracking data - GitHub - 514-labs/LLM-query-test: Performance comparison of ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL using LLM-style query patterns on realistic aircraft tracking data
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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