# Guidance vs Haystack — Fit & Features

Canonical: https://trutool.co/compare/guidance-vs-haystack
Author: Snehil (https://trutool.co/authors/snehil)

Compare Guidance and Haystack by use case, features, limitations, and evaluation questions.

## Compare fit, features, and limitations

### Guidance
Control language model generation with structured programming patterns.
Best fit: Developers composing agents, structured model outputs, and tool workflows.
- Constrained generation
- Prompt programming
- Model integration
Before you choose: Check licensing, provider compatibility, maintenance, and tool permissions. Test failure recovery before enabling agent actions.
Pricing: https://guidance.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- [Read Guidance profile](https://trutool.co/tools/guidance): Read Guidance profile

### Haystack
Framework for retrieval-augmented generation and AI agent pipelines.
Best fit: Developers building and evaluating custom agents.
- Framework for retrieval-augmented generation and AI agent pipelines
Before you choose: Check licensing, maintenance status, supported providers, and hosting or inference costs.
Pricing: https://haystack.deepset.ai/
- [Read Haystack profile](https://trutool.co/tools/haystack): Read Haystack profile