---
id: "intro"
title: "Introduction to Haystack"
slug: "intro"
excerpt: "Haystack is an **open-source framework** for building production-ready **LLM applications**,  **retrieval-augmented generative pipelines** and **state-of-the-art search systems** that work intelligently over large document collections. Learn more about Haystack and how it works."
hidden: false
createdAt: "Tue Aug 16 2022 10:08:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)"
updatedAt: "Tue Apr 29 2025 12:43:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)"
---
> 👍 Welcome to Haystack
>
> To skip the introductions and go directly to installing and creating a search app, see the [Get Started](/docs/Overview/get-started) page.

Haystack is an end-to-end framework that you can use to build powerful and production-ready pipelines with Large Language Models (LLMs) for different search use cases. Whether you want to perform retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), question answering, or semantic document search, you can use the state-of-the-art LLMs and NLP models in Haystack to provide custom search experiences and make it possible for your users to query in natural language.

Haystack is built in a modular fashion so that you can combine the best technology from OpenAI, Chroma, Marqo, and other open source projects, like Hugging Face's Transformers or Elasticsearch.

The core foundation of Haystack are components and pipelines together with Document Stores, Tools and a multitude of integrations. Read more about Haystack concepts in the [Haystack Concepts Overview](doc:components_overview).
