Dolphin vs MinerU

Side-by-side comparison of two AI agent tools

Short answer

  • Dolphin has had no commit in 6 months; MinerU is actively maintained (905 commits in the last 90 days).
  • MinerU is growing faster: +3,746 GitHub stars in the last 30 days vs +28 for Dolphin.
  • Pick Dolphin for: the official repo for “Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting”, ACL, 2025. Pick MinerU for: transforms complex documents like PDFs into LLM-ready markdown/JSON for your Agentic workflows.

From GitHub data refreshed daily.

The official repo for “Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting”, ACL, 2025.

MinerUfree

Transforms complex documents like PDFs into LLM-ready markdown/JSON for your Agentic workflows.

Metrics

DolphinMinerU
Stars9.1k81.0k
Star velocity /mo28.2539682539682533.7k
Commits (90d)0905
Releases (6m)010
Overall score0.233497012278650080.8909026784171507

Pros

  • +Universal document parsing capability that handles both digital and photographed documents seamlessly
  • +Advanced two-stage architecture with document-type-aware parsing strategies optimized for different document formats
  • +Comprehensive 21-element detection including complex elements like formulas, code blocks, and tables with attribute field extraction
  • +专门针对 LLM 优化的输出格式，确保转换后的 Markdown/JSON 能够被 AI 模型高质量理解和处理
  • +支持复杂 PDF 文档的结构化解析，保持表格、图像和文本布局的完整性
  • +提供 Python SDK 和 Web 应用双重接口，既适合程序化集成也支持交互式使用

Cons

  • -Research-focused tool that may require significant technical expertise to implement and integrate
  • -Relatively new release with limited production use cases and community feedback
  • -Large model size (3B parameters) may require substantial computational resources for deployment
  • -主要专注于 PDF 处理，对其他文档格式的支持可能有限
  • -复杂文档的处理质量可能依赖于原始文档的质量和结构清晰度
  • -大规模批量处理时可能需要考虑计算资源和处理时间的平衡

Use Cases

  • •Academic research document digitization and content extraction from PDFs and scanned papers
  • •Enterprise document processing for complex reports, invoices, and forms with mixed content types
  • •Automated parsing of technical documentation containing code snippets, mathematical formulas, and diagrams
  • •构建 RAG（检索增强生成）系统时，将企业内部 PDF 文档转换为向量数据库可索引的格式
  • •为 AI 代理开发智能文档分析功能，自动提取和结构化合同、报告中的关键信息
  • •建立知识管理系统，将历史文档资料转换为可搜索和可查询的结构化数据
View Dolphin DetailsView MinerU Details

FAQ

Which is more popular, Dolphin or MinerU?
MinerU has more GitHub stars (80,986 vs 9,058).
Which is more actively developed, Dolphin or MinerU?
MinerU had more commits in the last 90 days (905 vs 0).
Should I use Dolphin or MinerU?
Compare their capabilities, limitations and "best for" notes above. Trying each on a small task is the fastest way to decide.