Alternatives to LlamaIndex

RAG-Anything is an all-in-one multimodal RAG framework from the University of Hong Kong that processes text, images, tables, and equations through a unified pipeline built on LightRAG. It constructs multi-modal knowledge graphs by extracting multimodal entities and establishing cross-modal relationships. The VLM-Enhanced Query mode integrates visual content into large language models for deeper document understanding beyond plain text retrieval.

Dolphin is ByteDance's multimodal document parsing model that handles intertwined text, tables, formulas, and figures in complex documents. Using a two-stage analyze-then-parse approach with a Swin Transformer vision encoder and MBart decoder, it performs layout analysis and parallel element parsing with heterogeneous anchor prompts. Dolphin-v2 adds document-type awareness for invoices, papers, and forms.

PageIndex is a vectorless, reasoning-based RAG system that builds hierarchical tree indexes from long documents and uses LLMs to navigate them like a human expert would. Instead of chunking text and comparing embeddings, it constructs a table-of-contents-style structure and reasons its way to the right sections — no vector database required. Available as an open-source Python package, cloud API, MCP server, and chat platform.