Business fit7.0/10
Implementation readiness7.2/10
Verdict
Useful, but only with a strong evaluation harness owned by the team.
What was tested
Hybrid retrieval pipeline over a 2M-document corpus with structured filters.
Test environment
Qdrant + Postgres, custom evaluation harness.
Strengths
- Rich abstractions for common retrieval patterns
- Broad integration coverage across stores and loaders
- Easy to assemble a first working pipeline
Limitations
- Abstractions can obscure retrieval quality issues
- Built-in evaluation surface is thin; harnesses live outside
- Default chunking is rarely the right answer for production corpora
Risks
- Convenience masking mediocre retrieval when the team does not own the eval harness
- Coupling business logic to fast-moving framework abstractions
Integration notes
We use LlamaIndex selectively, often replacing core retrieval logic with our own implementation.