Flowise vs MaxKB
The 55k-star visual builder for LLM apps and agents — drag-and-drop chatflows and Agentflows, hundreds of nodes, self-hostable Node.js. Now ARCHIVED upstream (see 'Future of Flowise'). — versus — Open-source enterprise agent platform: RAG pipelines (upload or crawl docs), a visual workflow engine with MCP tool-use, and zero-code embedding into existing business systems.
maxkb covers Flowise's most common use — RAG chatbots over uploaded docs with a visual workflow engine — under an active enterprise-oriented project.
| Flowise | MaxKB | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 55k | 23k |
| Forks | 25k | 3.1k |
| Language | TypeScript | Python |
| License | NOASSERTION | GPL-3.0 |
| Last activity | 29 days ago | yesterday |
| Topics | orchestration, agents | agents, rag |
| Curated connections | 5 | 5 |
Flowise — the curator's take
Flowise is the reference example of the visual-agent-builder category and still runs fine self-hosted, which is the only reason to reach for it today: the repo has been archived and development has stopped, so treat it as frozen. If you are starting new, go to sim or bytechef for the same drag-and-drop model with active maintenance, or to maxkb/claraverse if the RAG/chat-app angle matters more than the canvas. Existing Flowise deployments: plan the migration rather than extending them; the node ecosystem (LangChain/LlamaIndex bindings) will drift out of date quickly. Listed for lineage and for the many teams who still run it.
MaxKB — the curator's take
The self-hosted answer to 'we need an internal AI assistant this quarter': upload or crawl your docs, get a RAG-grounded Q&A agent with a real workflow engine and MCP tool-use, then embed it into existing systems without code. Model-agnostic including fully private deployments. Battle-tested at 22k stars, mostly in enterprise support/knowledge-base roles. NOT a developer framework — you orchestrate in its UI, not your codebase (LangGraph territory); GPL-3.0 matters if you redistribute; and the project's center of gravity is the Chinese enterprise ecosystem — English docs and community trail the code.