Vercel AI SDK
Free open source TypeScript toolkit from Vercel for building AI apps and agents across many model providers.
Pricing Open sourceOpen source yesStars 27.7knpm a week 43M
LangChain alternatives
6 tools you can use instead of LangChain, ranked by live GitHub stars and npm downloads. Vercel AI SDK, CrewAI and Mastra are the most used. Stats updated 12 hours ago.
When LangChain is not a good fit
LangChain is an open source framework for building applications powered by language models, providing abstractions for chains, agents, tools and memory across many model providers. The framework itself is free; LangChain the company also runs LangSmith, a paid platform for observability, evaluation and deployment of LLM applications, with a free developer tier and paid plans from $39 a seat a month.
It is a weaker choice for:
- Very simple single-call LLM integrations, where LangChain's abstractions can add more complexity than needed
- Teams that specifically want a retrieval-and-indexing-first framework rather than a general orchestration framework, where LlamaIndex may fit better
- Projects that want to avoid any paid platform dependency, if they plan to rely on LangSmith's paid tiers for production observability
The alternatives
Most used first.
View Vercel AI SDK
CrewAI
MIT-licensed Python framework for multi-agent workflows, with a paid platform for deployment.
Pricing Open sourcePaid from Enterprise: custom quoteOpen source yesStars 60.4k
Mastra
TypeScript framework for AI agents and workflows, Apache 2.0 licensed, with a managed platform.
Pricing Open sourcePaid from $250 a month for TeamsOpen source yesStars 29.3knpm a week 3M
LlamaIndex
Open source data framework for connecting language models to your own data, plus a paid parsing platform.
Pricing FreemiumPaid from $50 a month for the LlamaParse Starter planOpen source yesStars 52.8knpm a week 168k
DSPy
Python framework from Stanford NLP for programming language model systems instead of writing prompts.
Pricing Open sourceOpen source yesStars 38.9k
Haystack
Open source Python framework from deepset for building LLM applications, RAG pipelines and agents.
Pricing Open sourceOpen source yesStars 26.9k
LangChain and its alternatives, side by side
| Tool | Pricing | Free plan | Paid from | Open source | GitHub stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LangChain | Freemium | Yes: the LangChain framework is free and open source; LangSmith has a free Developer tier with up to 5,000 base traces a month | $39 a seat a month for LangSmith Plus, plus usage-based compute and storage | Yes, MIT | 149k |
| Vercel AI SDK | Open source | The library is free and open source. You pay the model providers you call. | Not listed | Yes, Apache-2.0 | 27.7k |
| CrewAI | Open source | The framework is free and open source. The hosted Basic plan is $0 a month with 50 executions a month. | Enterprise: custom quote | Yes, MIT | 60.4k |
| Mastra | Open source | The self-hosted framework is free. The managed Starter plan is $0 a month with 100K events and 24 CPU hours included. | $250 a month for Teams | Yes, Apache-2.0 (core), Mastra Enterprise License (ee directories) | 29.3k |
| LlamaIndex | Freemium | Yes: the LlamaIndex framework is free and open source; LlamaParse has a free tier with 10,000 credits | $50 a month for the LlamaParse Starter plan | Yes, MIT | 52.8k |
| DSPy | Open source | Yes: free and open source | Not listed | Yes, MIT | 38.9k |
| Haystack | Open source | Yes: the framework is free and open source | Not listed | Yes, Apache-2.0 | 26.9k |
Pricing facts come from each tool's official pricing page, with the checked date on the tool's own page.
Questions
What is the most popular alternative to LangChain?
By GitHub stars, Vercel AI SDK is the most used alternative to LangChain listed on ScratchDB, with 27.7k stars.
Which LangChain alternatives are open source?
Vercel AI SDK, CrewAI, Mastra, LlamaIndex, DSPy and Haystack are open source.
Which LangChain alternatives have a free plan?
LlamaIndex, DSPy and Haystack have a free plan. The table on this page shows what each one includes.