Keywords AI

Docling vs LlamaIndex

Compare Docling and LlamaIndex side by side. Both are tools in the RAG Frameworks category.

Quick Comparison

Docling
Docling
LlamaIndex
LlamaIndex
CategoryRAG FrameworksRAG Frameworks
PricingOpen SourceOpen Source
Best ForDevelopers and researchers who need accurate document parsing with layout and table understandingDevelopers building data-intensive LLM applications who need flexible ingestion and retrieval
Websitegithub.comllamaindex.ai
Key Features
  • Document parsing with layout understanding
  • Table extraction from PDFs
  • OCR for scanned documents
  • Multiple output formats
  • Open-source and self-hosted
  • Data framework for LLM applications
  • 100+ data connectors
  • Advanced chunking and indexing
  • Query engines and agents
  • Evaluation and observability
Use Cases
  • PDF to structured data conversion
  • Academic paper processing
  • Financial report extraction
  • Scanned document digitization
  • Document understanding pipelines
  • 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 Docling vs LlamaIndex

Docling
Choose Docling if you need
  • PDF to structured data conversion
  • Academic paper processing
  • Financial report extraction
Pricing: Open Source
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 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.

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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