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ReviewRamble

The AI stack

From raw data to production AI, step by step.

22 steps, left to right: ingestion, parsing and OCR, chunking and embeddings, vector databases and graphs, agents and routing, the models, then fine-tuning, inference, deployment, guardrails and security. Hover a step to see the tools; click to compare them.

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01Ingestion& crawling02Parsing & OCR03Chunking04Embeddings05Vectordatabases06Knowledgegraphs & memory07Retrieval& reranking08Orchestration& agents09Tools & MCP10LLM routing& gateways11Language &reasoning models12Image models13Video models14Speech &voice models15Fine-tuning16Inferenceengines17Deployment& hosting18Guardrails19Security &red-teaming20Evaluation21Observability& tracing22Apps &interfaces

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Step 01 · Prepare

Ingestion & crawling

Pull content from websites, files, apps and databases. A model is only as current as the data you feed it. Ingestion decides what your system knows and how fresh it stays.

Compare all 10 tools

Tools we have reviewed

  • Crawling public sites: a crawler that returns clean Markdown saves a parsing step.
  • Internal apps and drives: prefer connectors with incremental sync over full re-imports.
  • Respect robots.txt and site terms; crawl only what you are allowed to.

Use cases, step by step

The steps each job needs, in order, with the tools we would start with.

Chat with your documents

Answer questions over PDFs, wikis and policies, with sources.

  1. 1Ingestion & crawlingFirecrawl4.2
  2. 2Parsing & OCRDocling4.5, LlamaParse4.2
  3. 3ChunkingChonkie3.7
  4. 4EmbeddingsQwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker4.2
  5. 5Vector databasesQdrant4.7
  6. 6Retrieval & rerankingVoyage rerank-34.6
  7. 7Orchestration & agentsLlamaIndex4.3
  8. 8Language & reasoning modelsClaude Sonnet 5.54.6
  9. 9Inference enginesTogether AI4.5
  10. 10Deployment & hostingModal4.5
  11. 11GuardrailsNVIDIA NeMo Guardrails4.0
  12. 12Security & red-teamingpromptfoo4.5
  13. 13EvaluationRagas3.4
  14. 14Observability & tracingLangfuse4.6
  15. 15Apps & interfacesOpen WebUI4.6

Customer support agent

Triage tickets, answer from your help centre and hand off to people.

  1. 1Ingestion & crawlingApify4.1
  2. 2Parsing & OCRMarkItDown3.8
  3. 3ChunkingChonkie3.7
  4. 4EmbeddingsCohere Embed 54.2
  5. 5Vector databasespgvector4.6
  6. 6Retrieval & rerankingCohere Rerank 43.7
  7. 7Orchestration & agentsLangGraph4.6
  8. 8LLM routing & gatewaysJev3.8
  9. 9Language & reasoning modelsClaude Haiku 5.54.5
  10. 10Deployment & hostingAWS MCP Server4.4
  11. 11GuardrailsNVIDIA NeMo Guardrails4.0
  12. 12Security & red-teamingpromptfoo4.5
  13. 13EvaluationDeepEval4.2
  14. 14Observability & tracingLangSmith4.2
  15. 15Apps & interfacesIntercom Fin4.7, Sierra4.5

Coding agent

Plan, write, test and review code across a repository.

  1. 1Ingestion & crawlingGitHub MCP Server4.7
  2. 2Parsing & OCRMarkItDown3.8
  3. 3ChunkingLlamaIndex4.3
  4. 4EmbeddingsQwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker4.2
  5. 5Vector databasesLanceDB4.0
  6. 6Tools & MCPGitHub MCP Server4.7, Context74.5, Serena4.2
  7. 7LLM routing & gatewaysOpenRouter4.6
  8. 8Language & reasoning modelsClaude Opus 5.54.7, GLM-5.34.4
  9. 9GuardrailsJev MCP4.3
  10. 10Security & red-teamingSnyk MCP Server (Snyk Studio)4.0, promptfoo4.5
  11. 11EvaluationInspect4.4
  12. 12Observability & tracingLangfuse4.6
  13. 13Apps & interfacesClaude Code4.7, Cursor4.5

Research & knowledge graph

Connect people, projects and events across thousands of documents.

  1. 1Ingestion & crawlingCrawl4AI4.2
  2. 2Parsing & OCRDocling4.5, PaddleOCR-VL-1.64.4
  3. 3ChunkingChonkie3.7
  4. 4Embeddingsvoyage-4-large4.5
  5. 5Vector databasesWeaviate4.2
  6. 6Knowledge graphs & memoryGraphRAG3.5, Neo4j4.1
  7. 7Retrieval & rerankingJina Reranker v3.54.3
  8. 8Orchestration & agentsLlamaIndex4.3
  9. 9Language & reasoning modelsGemini 4 Argon4.5
  10. 10EvaluationRagas3.4
  11. 11Observability & tracingArize Phoenix4.2
  12. 12Apps & interfacesAnythingLLM4.3

Assistant with long-term memory

Remember users, preferences and facts across conversations.

  1. 1Ingestion & crawlingUnstructured3.8
  2. 2Parsing & OCRMarkItDown3.8
  3. 3ChunkingChonkie3.7
  4. 4EmbeddingsJina Embeddings v54.3
  5. 5Vector databasesQdrant4.7
  6. 6Knowledge graphs & memoryGraphiti4.3, Mem04.0
  7. 7Orchestration & agentsOpenAI Agents SDK4.4
  8. 8Language & reasoning modelsGPT-6.1 Sol4.6
  9. 9Deployment & hostingCloudflare MCP Server4.5
  10. 10GuardrailsNVIDIA NeMo Guardrails4.0
  11. 11Security & red-teamingpromptfoo4.5
  12. 12EvaluationDeepEval4.2
  13. 13Observability & tracingLangfuse4.6
  14. 14Apps & interfacesLibreChat4.4

Voice agent

Answer calls and talk in real time.

  1. 1Ingestion & crawlingFirecrawl4.2
  2. 2Parsing & OCRDocling4.5
  3. 3ChunkingChonkie3.7
  4. 4EmbeddingsEmbeddingGemma 24.3
  5. 5Vector databasespgvector4.6
  6. 6Orchestration & agentsPydantic AI4.5
  7. 7LLM routing & gatewaysLaya3.4
  8. 8Language & reasoning modelsGemini 3.8 Flash4.1
  9. 9Speech & voice modelsParakeet TDT 0.6B v34.1, Cartesia Sonic 3.64.4
  10. 10Inference enginesGroq4.0
  11. 11Deployment & hostingModal4.5
  12. 12GuardrailsNVIDIA NeMo Guardrails4.0
  13. 13Security & red-teamingpromptfoo4.5
  14. 14EvaluationDeepEval4.2
  15. 15Observability & tracingLangfuse4.6

Document processing

Extract fields from invoices, forms and contracts, then route them.

  1. 1Ingestion & crawlingUnstructured3.8
  2. 2Parsing & OCRReducto4.3, PaddleOCR-VL-1.64.4, DeepSeek-OCR 23.7
  3. 3EmbeddingsQwen3-VL-Embedding4.3
  4. 4Orchestration & agentsn8n4.4
  5. 5LLM routing & gatewaysGLiNER2.5-Decide3.6
  6. 6Language & reasoning modelsGPT-6 Luna4.3
  7. 7Deployment & hostingAWS MCP Server4.4
  8. 8GuardrailsNVIDIA NeMo Guardrails4.0
  9. 9Security & red-teamingSnyk MCP Server (Snyk Studio)4.0
  10. 10EvaluationDeepEval4.2
  11. 11Observability & tracingOpik4.1