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LlamaIndex vs LangChain

Trust Score comparison · March 2026

LlamaIndex
82
Trust
Good
View profile
VS
Trust Score Δ
14
🏆 LangChain wins
LangChain
96
Trust
Excellent
View profile

Signal Comparison

300k / wknpm downloads8.2M / wk
300 commitsCommits (90d)201 commits
38k ★GitHub stars95k ★
5k q'sStack Overflow7.8k q's
Large & activeCommunityHigh
LlamaIndexLangChain

Key Differences

FactorLlamaIndexLangChain
LicenseMITMIT
LanguageTypeScript / PythonPython / TypeScript
HostedSelf-hostedSelf-hosted
Free tier
Open Source✓ Yes
TypeScript

Pick LlamaIndex if…

  • Building RAG over documents, PDFs, or databases
  • You want a data-centric approach vs LangChain's agent-centric
  • Complex ingestion pipelines with multiple data sources

Pick LangChain if…

  • You need the largest pre-built tool ecosystem for agents
  • You're building complex multi-step workflows
  • Your team already has LangChain experience

Side-by-side Quick Start

LlamaIndex
import { VectorStoreIndex, SimpleDirectoryReader } from 'llamaindex';

const documents = await new SimpleDirectoryReader().loadData({ directoryPath: './data' });
const index = await VectorStoreIndex.fromDocuments(documents);
const queryEngine = index.asQueryEngine();
const response = await queryEngine.query({ query: 'What is the main topic?' });
console.log(response.toString());
LangChain
from langchain_openai import ChatOpenAI
from langchain_core.prompts import ChatPromptTemplate

llm = ChatOpenAI(model="gpt-4o")

prompt = ChatPromptTemplate.from_messages([
    ("system", "You are a helpful assistant."),
    ("user", "{input}"),
])

chain = prompt | llm
response = chain.invoke({"input": "Hello!"})
print(response.content)

Community Verdict

Based on upvoted notes
🏆
LangChain wins this comparison
Trust Score 96 vs 82 · 14-point difference

LangChain leads on Trust Score with stronger signal data across downloads and community health. That said, the other tool is worth considering if your use case matches its specific strengths above.