Keywords AI

Carbon (Perplexity) vs Docling

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

Quick Comparison

Carbon (Perplexity)
Carbon (Perplexity)
Docling
Docling
CategoryRAG FrameworksRAG Frameworks
Pricingusage-basedOpen Source
Best ForB2B startups needing data ingestion from multiple sourcesDevelopers and researchers who need accurate document parsing with layout and table understanding
Websitecarbon.aigithub.com
Key Features
  • Data connectors
  • Google Drive
  • Notion
  • Slack integration
  • Document parsing with layout understanding
  • Table extraction from PDFs
  • OCR for scanned documents
  • Multiple output formats
  • Open-source and self-hosted
Use Cases
  • PDF to structured data conversion
  • Academic paper processing
  • Financial report extraction
  • Scanned document digitization
  • Document understanding pipelines

When to Choose Carbon (Perplexity) vs Docling

Docling
Choose Docling if you need
  • PDF to structured data conversion
  • Academic paper processing
  • Financial report extraction
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 Docling

Docling is IBM's open-source document conversion toolkit that transforms PDFs, DOCX, PPTX, and other document formats into structured JSON or markdown. It uses advanced layout analysis and table structure recognition to preserve document structure, making it ideal for preparing documents for RAG and LLM applications. Docling integrates with LlamaIndex and LangChain for seamless pipeline construction.

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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