LangChain vs LlamaIndex

LlamaIndex is centered on data-grounded retrieval, whereas LangChain covers end-to-end agent engineering.

Which to pick

What it is: LangChain:LangChain is an open platform for building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and governing LLM agents.; LlamaIndex:LlamaParse converts complex documents into structured, AI-ready data with agentic OCR and extraction.
Best for: LangChain:End-to-end agent engineering platform; LlamaIndex:Agentic OCR for complex docs
Who it’s for: LangChain:Developers and teams building AI agents and LLM-powered applications.; LlamaIndex:Developers building AI agents and RAG pipelines that need accurate document parsing.
Pricing: LangChain:Freemium; LlamaIndex:Freemium
Plans: LangChain:Developer $0 per seat per month · Plus $39 per seat per month; LlamaIndex:Free $0
Open source: LangChain:Yes, 147,359 GitHub stars; LlamaIndex:Yes, 52,381 GitHub stars
Works with: LangChain:—; LlamaIndex:Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Build agents fast. Start with proven patterns, customize harness, context, memory and model choice.
Trace-based testing. Debug runs with step-by-step tracing and query complex traces instantly.
Managed deployments. Deploy long-running agents with serverless or dedicated sandboxes and 30+ endpoints.
Production monitoring. Online evals, dashboards and alerts track quality, cost, latency and errors.
Feedback loop engine. Automatically detect issues, diagnose root causes and feed fixes back into evals.
Governance controls. Enforce cost limits, data redaction and human approval via LLM Gateway.

Agentic OCR. Layout-aware parsing of tables, charts, images and handwriting with high accuracy.
Schema-based Extraction. Turn unstructured content into structured JSON using LLM-powered agents without training.
Document Splitting & Classification. Automatically segment and categorize documents using natural-language rules.
Enterprise Indexing. Chunking and embedding pipeline for precise retrieval in RAG applications.
LiteParse Local Engine. Open-source, fast, on-device parsing of PDFs, Office files and images with no cloud limits.
Security & Compliance. SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA compliance with encryption, VPC deployment and granular access controls.

Is LangChain or LlamaIndex free?+

LangChain has a free plan (Developer); paid plans start at $39/month per user (Plus). LlamaIndex has a free plan and paid plans.

Is LangChain or LlamaIndex open source?+

Yes, both are open source: LangChain (langchain-ai/langchain on GitHub, MIT license) and LlamaIndex (run-llama/llama_index on GitHub, MIT license).

LangChain

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LlamaIndex

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Based on each tool's website and DevHunt data. Details may change; check the official sites.