39.6k stars · Apache-2.0 · v2.0.0 (2026-07-20)
The recognised open state-of-the-art PDF-to-Markdown converter — Docling's head-to-head, on a corpus of your users' actual uploads.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A Python PDF-to-Markdown-and-JSON converter built on layout models by the datalab.to team. Apache-2.0. Ships as CLI, Python library, and a hosted service.
Why it matters
Docling (Ed.3 #9) is IBM's answer; Marker is the community's. Both are alive and neither has one obvious win. This is the same head-to-head Ed.6 asked for on BERTopic vs turftopic vs LightRAG: two engines with overlapping strengths, and the only fair test is on real inputs. Marker tends to handle equations and tables better; Docling handles more input types. Run both on ten real PDFs and keep the winner. Both are Apache/MIT so no licence trap either way.
- Legitimate head-to-head option: no single PDF converter is best at everything
- Apache-2.0 — safe inside a paid Grasppy feature
- Fast, layout-aware, actively developed by a real team
- Model weights are large (~1 GB) — noticeable RAM footprint on the VPS
- Better with a GPU, though v2.0 improved CPU support
- Pick ONE (this or Docling) as the default — running both in production wastes resources
Paid PDF-extraction APIs
A chunker downstream, and a background job queue to run it out of the request path
Python library called from a Procrastinate job (Ed.5 #10).