Arize Phoenix vs Ragas
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted self-hosted ai options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Arize Phoenix | Ragas |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Read-the-docs project |
| Health score | 93 · Excellent | 72 · Good |
| Category | Self-Hosted AI | Self-Hosted AI |
| License | Elastic-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Python | Python |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, source | source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 11,594 | ★ 15,834 |
| First released | 2023 | 2023 |
| Replaces | LangSmith, Helicone | LangSmith |
What are Arize Phoenix and Ragas?
Arize Phoenix
Phoenix by Arize is an open-source observability platform for experimentation, evaluation and troubleshooting of LLM and ML applications. It runs as a self-hosted server collecting OpenTelemetry traces from AI apps.
- LLM tracing and spans
- Built-in evaluators
- OpenTelemetry-based
- Self-hostable
Ragas
Ragas is an open-source framework for evaluating retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. It provides metrics for faithfulness, answer relevancy, and context precision that can be run entirely on self-hosted infrastructure.
- RAG-specific metrics
- Synthetic test set generation
- Framework agnostic
- Local evaluation
Arize Phoenix vs Ragas: key differences
Both projects are written in Python. Licensing differs — Elastic-2.0 for Arize Phoenix versus Apache-2.0 for Ragas. Arize Phoenix lists first-class Docker deployment; Ragas does not.
Why pick each one
Choose Arize Phoenix if…
- Released under the Elastic-2.0 license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Mature project with 11.6k GitHub stars
- Written in Python
Choose Ragas if…
- Research-backed metrics
- Simple Python API
- Framework integrations
Watch out for
- Metrics need LLM calls
- Frequent API changes
Frequently asked questions
Is Arize Phoenix or Ragas better?
Neither is universally better. Ragas has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Arize Phoenix and Ragas free and open-source?
Yes. Arize Phoenix is licensed under Elastic-2.0 and Ragas under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Arize Phoenix and Ragas with Docker?
Arize Phoenix: yes. Ragas: check the project docs for container support.