Comparison between Sitefinity AI Assistant and Progress Agentic RAG
Overview
Sitefinity provides two AI assistant features that you can use to offer interactive conversational UX to your site visitors – Sitefinity AI Assistant and Progress Agentic RAG. You choose one of them based on your business needs and your organization's AI maturity.
Both configurations share the same user interface (an out-of-box widget you use on pages and page templates) and are available in Sitefinity Cloud and self-hosted deployments.
The difference is in the scope, ownership and configuration, not in the end-user experience.
They are designed for different business cases and therefore have different implementation in the backend.
This article explains the difference between both experiences so can make an informed decision which one is best suited for your website.
Unified AI Assistant interface
The AI Assistant interface is an out-of-the-box Sitefinity CMS widget available in both Sitefinity Cloud and self-hosted deployments.
It can be configured to use two different backends:
- Sitefinity AI Assistant
- Chat widget powered by Progress Agentic RAG
Differences at a glance
Sitefinity AI Assistant works with content available in your Sitefinity CMS instance, while Progress Agentic RAG works with your enterprise data and data hosted in other systems of record beyond the CMS.
Sitefinity AI Assistant
Sitefinity AI Assistant comes out of the box - it is a complete, ready-to-use AI assistant delivered as a native Sitefinity CMS widget. It supports only the content you manage in Sitefinity CMS and requires no development effort.
Deployment is completed in minutes.
The experience is owned by Marketing teams and is optimized for speed and immediate time-to-value.
You use Sitefinity AI Assistant primarily when your main goal is having public-facing content discovery or self-service scenarios.
For more information, see Sitefinity AI Assistant.
Progress Agentic RAG
Progress Agentic RAG uses the same AI Assistant chat widget combined with a backend powered by Progress Agentic RAG.
It supports content beyond Sitefinity CMS, including documentation systems, systems of record, enterprise documents and databases, and APIs.
Progress Agentic RAG requires manual setup and requires a backend setup owned by IT or technical teams.
It is optimized for flexibility and available functionality depends on the custom configuration and the capabilities provided by Progress Agentic RAG backend.
You use Progress Agentic RAG primarily when you need to use more granular retrieval strategy, to ingest and index content outside of Sitefinity CMS, or when the content is reused both publicly and within the company - for example, across departments.
For more information, see Progress Agentic RAG for ASP.NET Core, Next.js, and MVC.