Docling vs text-extract-api

Side-by-side comparison of two AI agent tools

Short answer

  • text-extract-api has had no commit in 9 months; Docling is actively maintained (357 commits in the last 90 days).
  • Docling is growing faster: +1,850 GitHub stars in the last 30 days vs +17 for text-extract-api.
  • Pick Docling for: get your documents ready for gen AI. Pick text-extract-api for: local FastAPI for OCR extraction and PII removal from images, PDFs and Office files to Markdown or JSON.

From GitHub data refreshed daily.

Doclingopen-source

Get your documents ready for gen AI

text-extract-apiopen-source

Local FastAPI for OCR extraction and PII removal from images, PDFs and Office files to Markdown or JSON

Metrics

Doclingtext-extract-api
Stars68.3k3.2k
Star velocity /mo1.8k16.736842105263158
Commits (90d)3570
Releases (6m)100
Overall score0.84502613534776640.20484123380037875

Pros

  • +Advanced PDF understanding with layout analysis, table structure recognition, and reading order detection
  • +Supports wide variety of document formats including office documents, images, audio, and markup languages
  • +Unified DoclingDocument representation simplifies integration with AI workflows and downstream processing
  • +完全本地化处理,无外部依赖,确保数据隐私和安全性
  • +支持多种先进OCR策略(LLaMA Vision、EasyOCR等),识别精度极高
  • +集成分布式队列和缓存机制,支持大规模文档批量处理

Cons

  • -Processing complex documents with advanced features may require significant computational resources
  • -需要安装多个依赖组件(Docker、Ollama),初始设置较为复杂
  • -本地运行PyTorch模型需要较大计算资源和存储空间

Use Cases

  • •Converting research papers and technical documents into AI-ready formats for RAG applications
  • •Extracting structured data from business documents like invoices, contracts, and reports for automation
  • •Preparing diverse document collections for training or fine-tuning language models
  • •医疗机构将MRI报告、病历等医疗文档转换为结构化数据
  • •企业财务部门处理发票、合同等文档并自动移除敏感信息
  • •法律机构批量数字化和分析大量合规文档或法律条文

FAQ

Which is more popular, Docling or text-extract-api?
Docling has more GitHub stars (68,329 vs 3,183).
Which is more actively developed, Docling or text-extract-api?
Docling had more commits in the last 90 days (357 vs 0).
Should I use Docling or text-extract-api?
Compare their capabilities, limitations and "best for" notes above. Both are open source, so trying each on a small task is the fastest way to decide.