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RAGFlow
Data AI

RAGFlow

Open-source RAG engine based on deep document understanding & OCR

4.8
freemiumadvancedTrendingVerifiedSince 2024-02
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About RAGFlow

RAGFlow is an open-source enterprise RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) engine based on deep document understanding and multimodal document parsing. Unlike naive RAG systems that slice documents into arbitrary character chunks—scrambling complex tables, footnotes, and multi-column layouts—RAGFlow preserves the original semantic structure of complex documents. Powered by DeepDoc computer vision models, RAGFlow extracts clean text, recognizes complex tables across multiple pages, identifies corporate hierarchies, and visually highlights exact source citations with bounding boxes inside PDF viewers. With self-hosted Docker deployment, low-code workflow orchestration, and native support for local and cloud LLMs, RAGFlow is widely adopted by enterprise organizations requiring zero hallucination in legal, financial, and technical document analysis.

RAGFlow distinguishes itself through template-based document chunking algorithms tailored to specific document types, including scientific papers, financial quarterly reports, legal contracts, manuals, and Excel sheets. This eliminates context fragmentation and ensures answers cite complete data tables. The retrieval engine combines hybrid vector embedding search with full-text keyword ranking (BM25) and cross-encoder re-ranking models, consistently achieving higher retrieval precision on benchmark evaluations. All search results feature verifiable ground-truth citations, allowing users to hover over AI answers and inspect the exact highlight coordinates on the original PDF document page.

How It Works
1

Deploy RAGFlow via Docker Compose (`docker compose up -d`) on local or cloud servers.

2

Upload complex documents in PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, or image formats.

3

Select a parsing template tailored to your document type (financial, legal, academic).

4

RAGFlow extracts structured content, tables, and visual chunks into the hybrid vector index.

5

Query the knowledge base via the web chat UI or REST API with verifiable PDF bounding-box citations.

Platforms
WebAPIlinuxmacos
Best For
enterprise-developersdata-engineersai-researchers
Screenshot
RAGFlow screenshot

Capabilities & Features

Free Tier
API Access
Open Source
Works Offline
Customizable
Multimodal
Image Input
File Upload
Plugins
Memory
Collaboration
Self-Hostable
No Signup RequiredVoice InputImage OutputVideo InputVideo OutputAudio OutputWeb SearchCode ExecutionWhite LabelBrowser Extension

Common Use Cases

1

enterprise-rag

2

document-qa

3

table-extraction

4

knowledge-base

Frequently Asked Questions

How does RAGFlow prevent hallucinations in enterprise document Q&A?

RAGFlow uses deep vision models to understand exact table and paragraph layout, pairs hybrid vector/keyword search with re-rankers, and provides visual bounding-box highlights on the original PDF for every generated answer.

Can RAGFlow be self-hosted on private on-premise servers?

Yes, RAGFlow is fully open-source and provides one-command Docker Compose deployment for air-gapped enterprise environments.

What document formats does RAGFlow support?

RAGFlow supports PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, CSV, TXT, HTML, Markdown, and scanned document images.

Pricing Modelfreemium

Free Plan

Open-source Docker edition is 100% free with unlimited local document indexing; Cloud free tier includes 50MB storage.

Paid Plan

Cloud Pro tier starts at $20/month for 5GB vector storage, multi-tenant team workspaces, and prioritized GPU OCR rendering.

Get Started

Pros & Cons

Deep document understanding that parses complex multi-page tables accurately

Verifiable ground-truth citations with visual PDF bounding-box highlights

Hybrid retrieval combining dense vector search, BM25 keyword matching, and re-ranking

Complete self-hosting via Docker with zero cloud data transmission

Pre-configured parsing templates for financial reports, legal contracts, and manuals

Docker deployment requires at least 16GB RAM and dedicated CPU/GPU resources

Initial document parsing is slower than naive character splitters due to OCR models

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