Keywords AI
Compare Carbon (Perplexity) and LlamaIndex side by side. Both are tools in the RAG Frameworks category.
| Category | RAG Frameworks | RAG Frameworks |
| Pricing | usage-based | Open Source |
| Best For | B2B startups needing data ingestion from multiple sources | Developers building data-intensive LLM applications who need flexible ingestion and retrieval |
| Website | carbon.ai | llamaindex.ai |
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| Use Cases | — |
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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.
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.
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 →