Three things in Haystack v3.3.0: (1) security — `anyio` is bumped to `>=4.14.2`, patching CVE-2026-63374 (GHSA-82r6-8w77-94w6); it's pulled in transitively through `httpx`/`openai`, so older versions were vulnerable; (2) performance — `SentenceWindowRetriever` now queries the Document Store once per `run`/`run_async` call instead of once per retrieved document; (3) Breaking: BM25L/BM25Plus (the default) now only return documents that contain at least one query term, which can shrink result counts; passing a negative `top_k` now raises `ValueError` instead of silently slicing; and a fix for lost whitespace at quoted sentence endings shifts chunk boundaries for re-indexed corpora.
Haystack 3.1.0 highlights: (1) Experimental `CompactionHook` with `SlidingWindowCompactor` (drop old turns) and `ToolResultPruningCompactor` (replace old tool results with placeholders) for managing context blowup in long conversations; (2) `AgentTool` lets you wrap a full Agent as another Agent's tool — the caller sees only the final reply, not intermediate steps; (3) Multiple pipeline deserialization and Jinja sandbox RCE vulnerabilities patched, plus several behavioral changes requiring migration (e.g. `Agent.state_schema` semantics changed, `custom_filters` now requires `unsafe=True`).
Haystack turns indexing, retrieval, generation, and evaluation into replaceable Components connected by directed-multigraph Pipelines; it fits Python teams that want RAG flows to be tested, versioned, and deployed as code.
LlamaIndex and Haystack are code-first frameworks; RAGFlow and Dify are managed application platforms; R2R packages retrieval as an API service. Choose how much control your team needs over ingestion, retrieval, and operations before choosing a tool.