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promptfoo 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.

Not the right match-up?
PR promptfoo Test, evaluate, and red-team LLM applications VS RA Ragas Evaluation framework for retrieval-augmented generation
FeaturepromptfooRagas
Deploy effortRead-the-docs projectRead-the-docs project
Health score97 · Excellent72 · Good
CategorySelf-Hosted AISelf-Hosted AI
LicenseMITApache-2.0
LanguageTypeScriptPython
Setup difficultyEasyMedium
Min. RAM1,024 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentbare-metal, binary, sourcesource
GitHub stars★ 25,409★ 15,834
First released20232023
ReplacesLangSmithLangSmith

What are promptfoo and Ragas?

promptfoo

promptfoo is a developer-friendly tool for testing and evaluating prompts, models, and RAG systems. It supports automated evaluations, comparisons, and security red-teaming with a local web viewer.

  • Automated prompt evals
  • Model comparison matrix
  • Red-teaming and security tests
  • Local web viewer

Read the full promptfoo guide →

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

Read the full Ragas guide →

promptfoo vs Ragas: key differences

Promptfoo is written in TypeScript, while Ragas is built with Python. Licensing differs — MIT for promptfoo versus Apache-2.0 for Ragas.

Why pick each one

Choose promptfoo if…

  • Simple YAML configs
  • Red-teaming built in
  • Runs fully locally

Watch out for

  • CLI-centric workflow
  • Node.js required
promptfoo details

Choose Ragas if…

  • Research-backed metrics
  • Simple Python API
  • Framework integrations

Watch out for

  • Metrics need LLM calls
  • Frequent API changes
Ragas details

Frequently asked questions

Is promptfoo or Ragas better?

promptfoo is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Ragas if its specific feature set fits your needs better.

Are promptfoo and Ragas free and open-source?

Yes. promptfoo is licensed under MIT and Ragas under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run promptfoo and Ragas with Docker?

promptfoo: check the project docs for container support. Ragas: check the project docs for container support.

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