CrewAI vs LlamaIndex

By valuation, LlamaIndex is the larger company at $93M versus $80M — a 1.2x difference. Size can also be measured by team: CrewAI employs 25 people while LlamaIndex has 75 employees.

LlamaIndex has raised more in total funding at $27.5M, compared to CrewAI's $24.5M — a gap of $3M. Combined, the two companies have completed 3 known funding rounds.

LlamaIndex leads with an Awaira Score of 78/100, while CrewAI sits at 71/100. That 7-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

CrewAI was founded by Joao Moura in 2023. LlamaIndex was founded by Jerry Liu in 2022. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

CrewAI: CrewAI is an open-source framework for building multi-agent AI systems founded in 2023. The platform enables developers to create collaborative autonomous agents that work together to accomplish complex tasks, shifting from single-agent systems to coordinated agent crews. The framework abstracts agent coordination, task management, and inter-agent communication, allowing developers to focus on defining agent roles and objectives rather than infrastructure. CrewAI's core technology centers on orchestrating multiple specialized agents that can delegate tasks, share context, and iterate toward solutions. The platform supports various AI models and integrates with popular language model providers. It emphasizes transparency and customization, providing tools for monitoring agent behavior and fine-tuning performance. The company operates in the AI agents category, a rapidly expanding segment addressing enterprise automation, research, and creative tasks. CrewAI has gained traction within developer communities as an accessible alternative to proprietary multi-agent platforms. The open-source model has generated significant adoption among startups and enterprises exploring agent-based solutions. Founded in 2023, CrewAI raised $18M in total funding and carries a valuation of $100M at seed stage. The company competes with frameworks and platforms offering agent orchestration, including Langchain, AutoGen, and commercial solutions. Its growth trajectory reflects increasing market interest in agent-based architectures for scaling AI applications. CrewAI's open-source approach to multi-agent orchestration has positioned it as a accessible developer framework amid growing enterprise demand for collaborative AI systems. LlamaIndex: LlamaIndex is a data framework company founded in 2022 that specializes in connecting large language models to external data sources. The platform enables developers to build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications by indexing, retrieving, and augmenting prompts with relevant documents, databases, and APIs. LlamaIndex provides tools for data ingestion, indexing strategies, and query engines that optimize how LLMs access and process enterprise information. The company's core offering addresses a fundamental limitation of large language models: their training data cutoff and inability to access real-time or proprietary information. LlamaIndex abstracts away the complexity of data integration, offering pre-built connectors to various data sources and multiple retrieval strategies to improve answer relevance and accuracy. Positioned within the broader AI agents and LLM infrastructure category, LlamaIndex competes alongside other data-to-LLM frameworks like LangChain and vector database providers. The platform has gained adoption among developers building enterprise AI applications, particularly those requiring grounding in external knowledge bases. The company has raised $28M in total funding and is currently at Series A stage, with a valuation of Not disclosed. Since its 2022 founding, LlamaIndex has experienced rapid adoption within the RAG application development community, reflecting growing demand for production-grade tools that integrate large language models with enterprise data. LlamaIndex solves the critical problem of efficiently connecting LLMs to external data sources through purpose-built indexing and retrieval infrastructure.

LlamaIndex got there first, launching in 2022 — that's 1 year of extra runway. CrewAI didn't arrive until 2023. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

CrewAI has about 25 employees; LlamaIndex has about 75. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both CrewAI and LlamaIndex compete in AI Agents, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.