Getting started

Welcome to Vectara! This section will help you choose the right starting path, create your first working application, and learn how Vectara supports agentic RAG, retrieval, generation, and production deployment.

Vectara helps you build AI agents and assistants that retrieve trusted context, generate grounded answers, use tools, and support enterprise governance requirements.

New to Vectara?

Start here if you are learning the platform for the first time.

1. Learn about Vectara - Understand the platform, core capabilities, and deployment options.
2. Sign up for a free trial to get immediate access to all features for 30 days.
3. Complete the developer quickstart to upload data and build your first app in 5 minutes
4. Explore the API reference to learn about data ingestion, search customization, and agent workflows.

Building agents?

Start here to create agents that can follow instructions, use tools, maintain context, and return grounded answers.

1. Get trial access - Sign up if you haven't already.
2. Developer quickstart - Learn how corpora, documents, and queries work.
3. Create your first agent - Create your first AI agent that can use tools, follow instructions, and maintain conversation context.
4. Review agent concepts - Understand instructions, tools, sessions, artifacts, and glossaries.
5. Review context engineering - Learn to improve retrieval, tool use, and response quality.
6. Review authentication methods and authorization levels - Set up authentication, control access, and prepare for production. control.

Explore tutorials and examples

Use tutorials when you want guided examples for common workflows.

• Build a chatbot
• Build a financial research agent
• FAQ and Q&A matching
• API recipes
• Common use cases

Stay updated and get help

• Review Release notes for new product features and major updates.
• Review the Changelog for documentation updates, API enhancements, and fixes.
• Explore Vectara demos and tutorials for additional implementation examples.

Additional Resources

Need complete data control? Vectara offers private deployment options for organizations with specific compliance, security, or infrastructure requirements:

• Private deployment options - Deploy on-premises (air-gapped), in your VPC, or in a dedicated cloud environment.
• Evaluation process - Start your evaluation for complete data sovereignty and compliance.