LlamaIndex vs Unstructured

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors.

The short answer

Free plan: Both have one
Public API: Both have one
Best fit: LlamaIndex: Developers building retrieval-augmented answers over PDFs, contracts and reports with tables and scans · Unstructured: Developers preparing mixed document collections for RAG or fine-tuning
Platforms: LlamaIndex: Web, Linux · Unstructured: Web, Linux, macOS, Windows
Trust score: About even — LlamaIndex 87, Unstructured 87

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

LlamaIndexOpen-source data framework for retrieval and agents, with LlamaParse as the paid document parsing, extraction and indexing service

UnstructuredTurns PDFs, scans, slides, emails and other messy files into clean structured data for RAG and LLM pipelines.

Side by side

Fact	LlamaIndex	Unstructured
Category	Agent Frameworks & Orchestration	Data Pipelines & ETL
Pricing model	Freemium	Freemium
Starts at	$50/mo	—
Public API	Yes	Yes
Trust score	87 / 100	87 / 100
Platforms	API, Web, Linux	Web, API, Linux, macOS, Windows
Company	LlamaIndex, Inc.	Unstructured Technologies
Launched	2023	2022
Last verified	Sep 6, 2026	Oct 2, 2026

What our research says

LlamaIndex

LlamaIndex is the pragmatic choice for a developer who wants retrieval over messy documents working this week: the open-source framework handles ingestion and querying, and LlamaParse does the hard part — tables, scans and layouts — as a paid API with a free tier large enough to prototype on. Teams that only need to chain model calls will find LangChain's ecosystem broader, and anyone parsing millions of pages should model the credit cost before committing, because agentic parsing multiplies the per-page rate.

Pros

Open-source framework with commercial-friendly licensing and connectors for most file and data sources
LlamaParse handles tables, multi-column layouts and scanned pages that plain text extractors mangle
Free tier of 10,000 credits a month and a $50 Starter plan make the cost curve gentle at the start
Enterprise options include private VPC and hybrid deployment, SSO and custom BAAs

Cons

Credit pricing is opaque until you test: basic pages cost one credit, agentic and VLM parsing cost several times more
The free tier allows file upload only, so connectors and external sources need a paid plan
Rapid API and library changes mean tutorials and integrations go stale quickly
Index limits (5 indexes, 50 files each on Free) are tight for anything beyond a demo

Unstructured

A solid first stop when your RAG project is blocked by awkward PDFs, tables and scans. It suits developers who want a library to start with and a hosted API when volume grows. Teams with only clean text sources will not need it.

Pros

Open-source library with a large community and an Apache-2.0 licence
Hosted free tier of 10,000 pages with no card required
Table extraction, OCR and layout order are handled for many file types
Connectors to common storage and vector stores

Cons

Per-page billing can add up on large archives
Business pricing is not published
Parsing quality on difficult layouts still needs checking against your own documents

Which one fits

Choose LlamaIndex if you need

Developers building retrieval-augmented answers over PDFs, contracts and reports with tables and scans
Teams that want extraction of structured fields from documents without training their own layout models
Startups prototyping on the free tier and growing into metered usage rather than a seat licence

Choose Unstructured if you need

Developers preparing mixed document collections for RAG or fine-tuning
Enterprises that need document ingestion in a private cloud with compliance paperwork