Promptfoo vs Ragas
Both are alternatives to Braintrust. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Ragas vs Promptfoo — same comparison, one verdict.
Promptfoo
TOP PICKPrompt regressions fail the build. Declarative evals that live in CI.
Promptfoo defines evaluations as YAML: your prompts, your test cases, your assertions, versioned in the repository next to the code they test. It runs from the CLI or in CI, compares outputs across models and prompt variants side by side, and fails the build when a change regresses. It also includes red-teaming for prompt injection and jailbreak testing. MIT licensed with no seat limits, which matters because everyone who edits a prompt should be running it.
Ragas
Purpose-built RAG evaluation — measures retrieval and generation separately.
Ragas evaluates RAG systems specifically, and its central insight is that retrieval failure and generation failure need separate measurement. Context precision and recall tell you whether the retriever found the right material; faithfulness and answer relevancy tell you whether the model used it honestly. Without that separation you know the answer was wrong but not which half to fix. Apache-2.0, and it composes with LlamaIndex and Haystack directly.
Side by side
| Promptfoo | Ragas | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 94 | 92 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Pricing | Free and MIT, unlimited seats. An enterprise tier exists for larger organisations. | Free, Apache-2.0. |
Promptfoo is Macrostack's recommended Braintrust alternative, so it's our pick here.
Promptfoo
Strengths
- +Evals live in your repo and run in CI — a regression blocks the merge
- +Side-by-side model and prompt comparison out of the box
- +Includes red-teaming for injection and jailbreak testing
- +MIT, no seat limits, nothing leaves your infrastructure by default
Trade-offs
- −YAML configuration gets long on large test suites
- −Reporting UI is lighter than a hosted platform's
- −Trace history is yours to store and manage
Ragas
Strengths
- +Separates retrieval quality from generation quality
- +Can generate a synthetic test set from your own documents
- +Integrates directly with LlamaIndex and Haystack
- +Apache-2.0
Trade-offs
- −RAG-specific — not a general evaluation framework
- −Judge-model calls make large suites cost real money
- −Metric scores need calibration before you trust them
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-11. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.