MAEQ vs Haystack / deepset
An open-source framework and enterprise platform for self-hosted, sovereign AI pipelines.
Checked against public documentation on 14 October 2026MAEQ
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.
29 capabilities, side by side.
Foundations
OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Mistral (EU), Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry, side by side. Your own keys or usage-billed access.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Bedrock, Gemini and self-hosted models, with your own keys.
docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗EU company (Amsterdam). EU storage and vector cloud by default; US or Asia, or your own S3 or Azure Blob, on request.
Self-host anywhere; an EU-region SaaS option is not documented.
docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗Hosted SaaS today.
Self-hosted, private cloud and air-gapped; Haystack is Apache-2.0.
deepset.ai ↗Managed agents
Agents, portals and automations run on MAEQ; there is nothing to deploy or scale.
One-click deployment with autoscaling and versioned service endpoints.
docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗Agents are generated from a plain-language description and automations are compiled from plain language, reviewed before saving.
Visual low-code pipeline builder that exports to code.
docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗The portal orchestrator routes each question to specialist agents, runs them in parallel and merges their answers.
Agents can call other agents as tools in a coordinator pattern.
docs.haystack.deepset.ai ↗Not yet. Agents carry an A2A-style description card, but there is no A2A endpoint.
Hayhooks (open source) supports A2A agent cards; platform support is not documented.
github.com ↗Shared and per-person memory; portal users can see and delete what is remembered about them.
Conversation memory and per-user memory tools; user visibility is not documented.
docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗E2B, Daytona or Blaxel workspaces, with git for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps.
Tools, actions and automations
1,600+ toolkits through Composio, first-party OAuth for GitHub, Slack, Jira, Teams, Azure DevOps and Gmail, and your own MCP servers.
Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients can search the knowledge and ask the portals a scoped key allows.
Scheduled, run-now, chained and platform-event triggers; inbound webhook triggers are not available yet.
Batch jobs; scheduled and event triggers are not documented.
haystack.deepset.ai ↗The reviewer sees the exact pending action, such as the email about to be sent, and can edit, swap or regenerate it.
Enterprise context layer
SharePoint, Google Drive and Dropbox sync incrementally, following changes and deletions; S3 and Azure Blob are read in place.
Indexing pipelines; managed sync connectors are not documented.
docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗Dropped folders and archives are de-duplicated, grouped by topic and proposed as knowledge bases; duplicates merge into restorable golden records.
Snowflake Cortex Analyst and Databricks Genie: the warehouse writes and runs the SQL, and MAEQ shows it.
Snowflake as a document store; text-to-SQL is yours to build.
docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗Portals and end users
Branded portals for staff or customers, an embeddable website assistant, and SSO with Entra ID, Okta or any OIDC provider.
Governance, quality and cost
25 policy types (PII, prompt injection, toxicity, quotas, IP and time limits, tool-chain control), plus Lakera Guard, Bedrock Guardrails, NeMo and Guardrails AI.
A versioned registry of your MAEQ agents with auto-written description cards; other vendors' agents are not covered.
Every call with its steps and cost; export traces to your own Langfuse. LangSmith, Arize and Helicone export are coming.
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.
Built-in evaluation and groundedness observability.
docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗Users rate answers with a reason; a triage console turns each complaint into a recommended fix and where to make it.
Feedback collected in the playground and on prototypes.
docs.cloud.deepset.ai ↗Not yet: no simulated users or task-completion graders.
The cost of every call is recorded in a credit ledger, with token, cost and invocation quotas.
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.
Each client gets an isolated tenant with its own branding, data and plan; a partner console across clients is not available yet.
On the MAEQ roadmapComing soon
Intake already prepares the hand-off. Next is a model of your entities, terms and relationships, built automatically from your documents and data.
Agents already combine warehouse figures and documents in one answer. Next, MAEQ decides per question which source should answer what.
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.
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.
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