AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Python package for generating accurate SQL via LLMs using RAG
Hello HN! We’ve been working hard on Vanna, our RAG framework for SQL generation and we’ve been updating our documentation. Please have a look — we have a ton of Jupyter notebooks for any combination of desired use cases. At it’s heart, we have abstractions that help you: - “train” a RAG “model” i.e. add metadata for the retrieval augmentation system to reference when constructing the LLM prompt (yes, we know that the terms “train” and “model” are somewhat confusing and we’re open to changing those terms if you can suggest better ones) - “ask” questions, which will generate SQL, run it,…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Python package for generating accurate SQL via LLMs using RAG launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

Hey HN, We are Zain and Ashish, founders of Vanna AI. We recently embarked on an experiment to see if large language models (specifically LLMs) could help in generating SQL queries for real-world datasets. We initially started this project as a web app but realized that it was most useful and had broadest applicability as a Python package since you can then incorporate it into an existing workflow (Jupyter notebook, Slackbot, etc). We've had some good success with customer datasets but we've generally heard a lot of skepticism so we decided to write a paper about the methodology we're using…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2

Hey there HN! We've just open-sourced Vanna – a Python package that allows you to transform questions into SQL. We've leveraged LLMs to enable you to "ask" databases what you need, bypassing the need to "write" complex SQL. Quick Overview: - "Train" using DDL statements, documentation, or known correct SQL statements. - "Ask" questions in natural language and receive SQL, tables, and charts in return. - Open Source Flexibility: Swap storage mechanisms, customize LLMs, and choose your databases. - Local or Hosted: Operate everything locally or use our hosted version for free (including…
2023 · vanna.ai · its alternatives →
- 3

Outlines is a Python library that focuses on text generation with large language models. Brandon and I are not LLM experts and started the project a few months ago because we wanted to understand better how the generation process works. Our original background is probabilistic, relational and symbolic programming. Recently we came up with a fast way to generate text that matches a regex (https://blog.normalcomputing.ai/posts/2023-07-27-regex-guide...). The basic idea is simple: regular expressions have an equivalent Deterministic-Finite Automaton (DFA) representation. We…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4

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 →
- 5
RAGstack▲111Deploy a private ChatGPT alternative hosted within your VPC
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6

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 →
- 7

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 →
- 8

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 →
- 9

After working with LLMs for long enough, I found myself wanting a lightweight utility for doing various small tasks to prepare inputs, locate information and create evaluators. This library is two things: a very simple model and utilities that inference it (eg. fuzzy deduplication). The target platform is CPU, and it’s intended to be light, fast and pip installable — a library that lowers the barrier to working with strings semantically. You don’t need to install pytorch to use it, or any deep learning runtimes. How can this be accomplished? The model is simply token embeddings that are…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10

Go from dataset to custom RAG prototype in 5 minutes
2024 · cloudera.com · its alternatives →
- 11

This is a Python package that allows you to write function signatures to define LLM queries. This makes it easy to mix regular code with calls to LLMs, which enables you to use the LLM for its creativity and reasoning while also enforcing structure/logic as necessary. LLM output is parsed for you according to the return type annotation of the function, including complex return types such as streaming an array of structured objects. I built this to show that we can think about using LLMs more fluidly than just chains and chats, i.e. more interchangeably with regular code, and to make it…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12

Hello HN, I'm Owen from SciPhi (https://www.sciphi.ai/), a startup working on simplifying˛Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Today we’re excited to share R2R (https://github.com/SciPhi-AI/R2R), an open-source framework that makes it simpler to develop and deploy production-grade RAG systems. Just a quick reminder: RAG helps Large Language Models (LLMs) use current information and specific knowledge. For example, it allows a programming assistant to use your latest documents to answer questions. The idea is to gather all the relevant information…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13

Convert your vector embeddings into a set of questions and their ideal responses. Use this dataset to test your LLM and catch failures caused by prompt or RAG updates. Get started in 3 lines of code: ``` pip3 install fiddlecube ``` ``` from fiddlecube import FiddleCube fc = FiddleCube(api_key="") dataset = fc.generate( [ "The cat did not want to be petted.", "The cat was not happy with the owner's behavior.", ], 10, ) dataset ``` Generate your API key: https://dashboard.fiddlecube.ai/api-key # Ideal QnA datasets for testing, eval and training LLMs Testing, evaluation or…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14IB
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 →
- 15

Hey HN! We're excited to share our new open-source project, Marvin. Marvin is a high-level library for building AI-powered software. We developed it to address the challenges of integrating LLMs into more traditional applications. One of the biggest issues is the fact that LLMs only deal with strings (and conversational strings at that), so using them to process structured data is especially difficult. Marvin introduces a new concept called AI Functions. These look and feel just like regular Python functions: you provide typed inputs, outputs, and docstrings. However, instead of relying on…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16SA
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 →
- 17

Hey HN! If you’re at all interested in LLMs/LLM-apps, you’ve probably heard of RAG: Retrieval-Assisted Generation, i.e. retrieving relevant documents to give to your LLM as context to answer user queries. Today, I’m releasing RAGatouille v0.0.1, whose aim is to make it as easy as can be to improve your RAG pipelines by leveraging state-of-the-art Information Retrieval research. As of right now, there’s quite a big gap between common everyday practice and the IR literature, and a lot of the gap is because there just aren’t good ways to quickly try out and leverage SotA IR techniques.…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18

A repository that contains models, datasets, and fine-tuning techniques for DB-GPT, with the purpose of enhancing model performance in Text-to-SQL - eosphoros-ai/DB-GPT-Hub
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19

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 →
- 20IB
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

Hi, I was a corporate lawyer for many years working with a lot of financial services and insurance companies. In practicing law, I noticed there was a lot of repetition in the tasks I was working on even as a highly paid attorney that could be automated. I wanted to solve the problem of dealing with a lot information and data in a practical way, using AI. This motivated me to start AI Bloks/LLMWare with my husband, who had a deep background in software and is a very early adopter of AI. We have been on this journey with our open source project LLMWare for the past 4 months, producing a…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22

Hi HN! I lead product at Vectara and we've just released a new LLM in our platform that outperforms GPT4 and Gemini 1.5 Pro on RAG tasks. Vectara is a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) platform primarily deployed as a SaaS service which includes a generous free tier so you can try it for free. The way we've been able to offer a "better but cheaper" is that we focus a lot of our attention on taking smaller models (which can be hosted in a cost efficient way) and fine tuning them to specific tasks: in this case RAG. This ends up with a model that is less capable of arbitrary tasks like…
2024 · vectara.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Datatune ▲38Modern AI tools use SQL/Code generation agents or RAG to access the user data to perform transformations. However, the drawback is that this doesn't provide row-level intelligence, especially in case of semantic intelligence is required to understand how to perform the transfromations on each row of the data. We've released Datatune (https://github.com/vitalops/datatune) as a tool to let users connect entire user Data with LLMs and Agents, to help users access their entire data with just a prompt. While building Agents for a customer who had large amounts of data, we…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

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 →
Also compare
- How to use LLMs to generate accurate SQL for real-world data alternatives
- Vanna AI – Open-sourced text-to-SQL in Python alternatives
- LLMs can generate valid JSON 100% of the time alternatives
- How we leapfrogged traditional vector based RAG with a 'language map' alternatives
- RAGstack alternatives
- Ragas – Open-source library for evaluating RAG pipelines alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →