Frameworks

MAEQ vs Haystack / deepset

An open-source framework and enterprise platform for self-hosted, sovereign AI pipelines.

Checked against public documentation on 14 October 2026

MAEQ

Managed AI agents on any model, a branded AI portal and an enterprise context layer, with governance set once.

Haystack / deepset

An open-source framework and enterprise platform for self-hosted, sovereign AI pipelines.

Covers: Haystack (open source), Haystack Enterprise Platform

Vendor website ↗

When Haystack / deepset is the better fit

Organisations that must self-host or run air-gapped and have engineers to build pipelines.

How MAEQ differs

MAEQ is hosted and ready on day one, with portals, managed sync, automations and approvals built in. Haystack is the better fit where self-hosting is mandatory.

Row by row

29 capabilities, side by side.

AvailablePartialComing soonBuild it yourselfNot offeredNot documented

Foundations

Choice of model vendor, with your own keys
Use models from several vendors, and bring your own API keys.
MAEQAvailable

OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Mistral (EU), Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry, side by side. Your own keys or usage-billed access.

Haystack / deepsetAvailable

OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Bedrock, Gemini and self-hosted models, with your own keys.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
EU data residency
Keep data, and where possible processing, inside the EU.
MAEQAvailable

EU company (Amsterdam). EU storage and vector cloud by default; US or Asia, or your own S3 or Azure Blob, on request.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Self-host anywhere; an EU-region SaaS option is not documented.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Self-host or run in your own cloud
Run the platform on your own infrastructure or cloud account.
MAEQNot offered

Hosted SaaS today.

Haystack / deepsetAvailable

Self-hosted, private cloud and air-gapped; Haystack is Apache-2.0.

deepset.ai ↗

Managed agents

Managed agent runtime
The vendor runs your agents; nothing to deploy or scale yourself.
MAEQAvailable

Agents, portals and automations run on MAEQ; there is nothing to deploy or scale.

Haystack / deepsetAvailable

One-click deployment with autoscaling and versioned service endpoints.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
No-code agent builder for business users
Business users can create agents without writing code.
MAEQAvailable

Agents are generated from a plain-language description and automations are compiled from plain language, reviewed before saving.

Haystack / deepsetAvailable

Visual low-code pipeline builder that exports to code.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Routing across specialist agents
Questions are routed to specialist agents and their answers combined.
MAEQAvailable

The portal orchestrator routes each question to specialist agents, runs them in parallel and merges their answers.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Agents can call other agents as tools in a coordinator pattern.

docs.haystack.deepset.ai ↗
A2A protocol
Agents talk to agents on other platforms through the open Agent2Agent protocol.
MAEQNot offered

Not yet. Agents carry an A2A-style description card, but there is no A2A endpoint.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Hayhooks (open source) supports A2A agent cards; platform support is not documented.

github.com ↗
Memory users can see and edit
Agents remember facts across conversations, and people can see and correct them.
MAEQAvailable

Shared and per-person memory; portal users can see and delete what is remembered about them.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Conversation memory and per-user memory tools; user visibility is not documented.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Code sandboxes and coding workspaces
Agents write and run code in isolated sandboxes, including git repositories.
MAEQAvailable

E2B, Daytona or Blaxel workspaces, with git for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Inline code components; no isolated agent sandbox.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗

Tools, actions and automations

MCP tools and app connectors
Agents act in business apps through MCP and managed connectors.
MAEQAvailable

1,600+ toolkits through Composio, first-party OAuth for GitHub, Slack, Jira, Teams, Azure DevOps and Gmail, and your own MCP servers.

Haystack / deepsetAvailable

MCP client and 180+ components.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Your knowledge and agents as an MCP server
Other AI clients (Claude, Cursor and others) can use your knowledge and agents.
MAEQAvailable

Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients can search the knowledge and ask the portals a scoped key allows.

Haystack / deepsetAvailable

Each workspace exposes chosen pipelines as MCP tools.

deepset.ai ↗
Automations on schedules, chains and events
Agents run on their own on a schedule, after another run, or on an event.
MAEQAvailable

Scheduled, run-now, chained and platform-event triggers; inbound webhook triggers are not available yet.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Batch jobs; scheduled and event triggers are not documented.

haystack.deepset.ai ↗
Approvals where the reviewer can edit or regenerate
A person reviews the exact pending action and can edit or regenerate it before it runs.
MAEQAvailable

The reviewer sees the exact pending action, such as the email about to be sent, and can edit, swap or regenerate it.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Tool-confirmation hooks.

haystack.deepset.ai ↗

Enterprise context layer

Managed document sync
SharePoint, Google Drive and similar sources stay in sync without custom pipelines.
MAEQAvailable

SharePoint, Google Drive and Dropbox sync incrementally, following changes and deletions; S3 and Azure Blob are read in place.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Indexing pipelines; managed sync connectors are not documented.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Automated intake and curation
Dropped documents are de-duplicated, grouped and proposed as knowledge bases.
MAEQAvailable

Dropped folders and archives are de-duplicated, grouped by topic and proposed as knowledge bases; duplicates merge into restorable golden records.

Haystack / deepsetBuild it yourself

Build it with indexing pipelines.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Snowflake and Databricks grounding, both native
Answers grounded in governed warehouse data, with the warehouse computing the figures.
MAEQAvailable

Snowflake Cortex Analyst and Databricks Genie: the warehouse writes and runs the SQL, and MAEQ shows it.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Snowflake as a document store; text-to-SQL is yours to build.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗

Portals and end users

Branded portal, website widget and SSO
A ready, branded AI portal for staff or customers, an embeddable website assistant and single sign-on.
MAEQAvailable

Branded portals for staff or customers, an embeddable website assistant, and SSO with Entra ID, Okta or any OIDC provider.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Shareable prototypes and a playground.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗

Governance, quality and cost

Policies and guardrails
PII protection, prompt-injection defence, quotas and access rules, enforced on every call.
MAEQAvailable

25 policy types (PII, prompt injection, toxicity, quotas, IP and time limits, tool-chain control), plus Lakera Guard, Bedrock Guardrails, NeMo and Guardrails AI.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Guardrails through hooks you configure; RBAC and audit logs.

deepset.ai ↗
Agent identity and registry, including other vendors' agents
A governed inventory of agents with their own identities, across platforms.
MAEQPartial

A versioned registry of your MAEQ agents with auto-written description cards; other vendors' agents are not covered.

Haystack / deepsetNot documented

Not described in the documentation.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Tracing, call trail and export
Every call traced step by step, with export to your own observability tool.
MAEQAvailable

Every call with its steps and cost; export traces to your own Langfuse. LangSmith, Arize and Helicone export are coming.

Haystack / deepsetAvailable

Traces with root-cause flagging; Langfuse integration.

deepset.ai ↗
Retrieval and answer-quality evaluation
Measure whether the right sources are found and whether answers are grounded in them.
MAEQAvailable

Automatically built test sets, recall@k and MRR, regression checks, AI-judge groundedness, citation checks, and Comparison Lab to test models and search settings side by side.

Haystack / deepsetAvailable

Built-in evaluation and groundedness observability.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
User feedback to triage to fix
User ratings flow into a triage queue that recommends a concrete fix.
MAEQAvailable

Users rate answers with a reason; a triage console turns each complaint into a recommended fix and where to make it.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Feedback collected in the playground and on prototypes.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Agent simulation and task-completion graders
Simulated users and graders that score whether agents complete whole tasks.
MAEQNot offered

Not yet: no simulated users or task-completion graders.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Pipeline-level evaluation.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Cost tracking and quotas per call
The cost of every call is recorded, and budgets or quotas can cap it.
MAEQAvailable

The cost of every call is recorded in a credit ledger, with token, cost and invocation quotas.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Token usage per model; cost in money is not shown.

deepset.ai ↗
Automated model-retirement tracking and migration
New and retiring models are detected, and agents are moved with an impact preview.
MAEQAvailable

Daily discovery of new and retiring models across four providers, and a watch on deprecation pages. Guided migration with an impact preview and rollback, started by a person.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Swap models without changing pipelines; versioned services.

deepset.ai ↗
Many client organisations from one console
Consultancies and integrators run many client organisations from one place.
MAEQPartial

Each client gets an isolated tenant with its own branding, data and plan; a partner console across clients is not available yet.

Haystack / deepsetPartial

Up to 100 workspaces per organisation.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗

On the MAEQ roadmapComing soon

Automated enterprise ontology
A model of your entities, terms and relationships, built automatically from your data.
MAEQComing soon

Intake already prepares the hand-off. Next is a model of your entities, terms and relationships, built automatically from your documents and data.

Haystack / deepsetBuild it yourself

Not a product feature.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Unified triage across documents and warehouse data
Deciding per question which source answers what, across documents and governed tables.
MAEQComing soon

Agents already combine warehouse figures and documents in one answer. Next, MAEQ decides per question which source should answer what.

Haystack / deepsetBuild it yourself

Build it with pipelines.

docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗
Conflict triage with confidence scores and human review
Conflicts between datasets, data types or local, regional and global sources are detected, scored and routed to a reviewer when confidence is low.
MAEQComing soon

Detect conflicting figures and statements across datasets, data types and local, regional and global sources; score confidence and send low-confidence cases to a reviewer.

Haystack / deepsetBuild it yourself

Build it with pipelines and hooks.

haystack.deepset.ai ↗

How this comparison is made

Every Haystack / deepset cell is based on the vendor's own documentation, release notes or pricing pages, checked on 14 October 2026, and links to its source. If something here is out of date, email hello@maeq.com and we will correct it.

“Not documented” means we could not confirm a capability from public sources, not that it is missing. Rows in the last group are on the MAEQ roadmap and marked “Coming soon”.

See it on your own data.

Book a free proof of concept with our team, or sign up and explore the public beta yourself.

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