Ragas vs Weave
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted self-hosted ai options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Ragas | Weave |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Read-the-docs project | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 72 · Good | 83 · Excellent |
| Category | Self-Hosted AI | Self-Hosted AI |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Python | Python |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | source | docker, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 15,834 | ★ 1,130 |
| First released | 2023 | 2023 |
| Replaces | LangSmith | LangSmith |
What are Ragas and Weave?
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
Weave
Weave is a lightweight toolkit from Weights & Biases for logging, tracing and evaluating LLM application calls. The tracing server component can be self-hosted to keep AI evaluation data on your own infrastructure.
- LLM call tracing
- Evaluation framework
- Self-hostable server
- Python-native
Ragas vs Weave: key differences
Both projects are written in Python. Ragas has the considerably larger community, at 15,834 GitHub stars versus 1,130. Weave lists first-class Docker deployment; Ragas does not.
Why pick each one
Choose Ragas if…
- Research-backed metrics
- Simple Python API
- Framework integrations
Watch out for
- Metrics need LLM calls
- Frequent API changes
Choose Weave if…
- Released under the Apache-2.0 license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Active community (1.1k GitHub stars)
- Written in Python
Frequently asked questions
Is Ragas or Weave 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 Ragas and Weave free and open-source?
Yes. Ragas is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Weave under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Ragas and Weave with Docker?
Ragas: check the project docs for container support. Weave: yes.