MaxKB vs supavec
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. — versus — Open-source RAG-as-a-service (the Carbon.ai alternative): upload any data source, get vector search and a chat API in minutes — Supabase-based, multi-tenant with RLS, streaming responses.
Both are open platforms for shipping RAG: MaxKB is the batteries-included enterprise product — visual workflows, UI, zero-code embedding into business systems; Supavec is the developer primitive — a clean REST API for ingestion and chat you build your own product on.
| MaxKB | supavec | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 22k | 1.1k |
| Forks | 3.0k | 102 |
| Language | Python | TypeScript |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Last activity | today | 6 months ago |
| Topics | agents, rag | rag |
| Curated connections | 3 | 2 |
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.
supavec — the curator's take
The API-first take on RAG: POST a file, query a /chat endpoint, done — with genuinely production-minded internals (row-level security for tenant isolation, batched embeddings cutting OpenAI cost ~65%, Redis sliding-window rate limits, request tracing). Use it when you want RAG behind an API for your product without assembling the pipeline yourself. Know the shape: it's an open-core SaaS — usage-tiered billing on the cloud version, and self-hosting means running the Next.js + Supabase + Upstash stack yourself with docs that assume you'll read the code. For a self-contained enterprise RAG product with a UI, MaxKB; for just the vector store, Chroma.