Keywords AI

Carbon (Perplexity) vs LlamaIndex

Compare Carbon (Perplexity) and LlamaIndex side by side. Both are tools in the RAG Frameworks category.

Quick Comparison

Carbon (Perplexity)
Carbon (Perplexity)
LlamaIndex
LlamaIndex
CategoryRAG FrameworksRAG Frameworks
Pricingusage-basedOpen Source
Best ForB2B startups needing data ingestion from multiple sourcesDevelopers building data-intensive LLM applications who need flexible ingestion and retrieval
Websitecarbon.aillamaindex.ai
Key Features
  • Data connectors
  • Google Drive
  • Notion
  • Slack integration
  • Data framework for LLM applications
  • 100+ data connectors
  • Advanced chunking and indexing
  • Query engines and agents
  • Evaluation and observability
Use Cases
  • Building RAG pipelines from any data source
  • Enterprise knowledge base creation
  • Multi-source data integration for AI
  • Structured data extraction and querying
  • Agent-based data interaction

When to Choose Carbon (Perplexity) vs LlamaIndex

LlamaIndex
Choose LlamaIndex if you need
  • Building RAG pipelines from any data source
  • Enterprise knowledge base creation
  • Multi-source data integration for AI
Pricing: Open Source

About Carbon (Perplexity)

Carbon, acquired by Perplexity in December 2024, provided pre-built data connectors for ingesting unstructured data from 25+ sources into LLM applications. Its managed API was wound down in March 2025, with its technology now integrated into Perplexity's enterprise data connectivity stack. Carbon's connectors supported Google Drive, Notion, Slack, Confluence, and other popular data sources for RAG pipelines.

About LlamaIndex

LlamaIndex (formerly GPT Index) is a data framework for connecting LLMs with external data sources. It provides connectors for 160+ data sources, document parsers, indexing strategies, and query engines that make it easy to build RAG applications. LlamaIndex supports advanced retrieval patterns including recursive retrieval, knowledge graphs, and multi-document agents. The LlamaCloud managed service handles document ingestion and parsing at scale.

What is RAG Frameworks?

Frameworks and tools for building retrieval-augmented generation pipelines—document parsing, chunking, indexing, and query engines that connect LLMs to your data.

Browse all RAG Frameworks tools →

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