MinerU (OpenDataLab)
Leading#3 in Open sourcehigh confidence
High-accuracy PDF-to-Markdown/JSON extraction; the standout for complex academic papers and CJK layouts (~76k stars).Our read
Why it ranks #3
A leading complex-document parser at about 75.6k GitHub stars, repeatedly highlighted in PDF-to-Markdown comparisons for academic, formula and CJK layouts.Here is the catch
model downloads and GPU acceleration add operational weight
installation is more involved than lightweight parsers
results still need review on unusual scans and layouts
Does this well
strong results on dense academic and technical layouts
good handling of formulas, tables and CJK text
produces assets and structure useful for RAG pipelines
Pricing
Checked by hand on 2026-07-23. Prices in this category change often — if this looks wrong, it probably is.
Key features
PDF-to-Markdown and JSON conversionLayout, table and formula recognitionReading-order reconstructionOCR for scanned and multilingual documents
Sources we read
Quick facts
More in this area
The rest of the Open source column.- 1Stirling-PDFThe de-facto open-source PDF toolkit: 50+ local operations — merge, split, OCR, convert, sign, redact, compress — fully self-hosted. The recognized OSS PDF leader (~88k stars).
- 2MarkItDown (Microsoft)Microsoft's document-to-Markdown converter (PDF, Office, images, audio) built to feed clean text to LLMs; the highest-starred tool in this space (~169k stars).
- 4Docling (IBM / DS4SD)IBM's document parser (PDF, DOCX, PPTX) with strong layout and table understanding; a default in the LlamaIndex/LangChain ecosystem (~64k stars).
- 5marker (Datalab)Fast, high-quality PDF/EPUB/DOCX to Markdown conversion with tables, math, and images; a general-purpose favorite (~38k stars).
- 6pdfplumberPrecise text, table, and layout extraction from born-digital PDFs; the go-to Python library for table scraping (~11k stars).
- 7PyMuPDFFast low-level PDF/XPS parsing, rendering, and editing (MuPDF bindings); the performance workhorse under many pipelines (~10k stars).