Dolphin vs unstructured
Side-by-side comparison of two AI agent tools
Short answer
- Dolphin has had no commit in 6 months; unstructured is actively maintained (32 commits in the last 90 days).
- unstructured is growing faster: +188 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 unstructured for: open-source ETL for converting documents into structured data for language models.
From GitHub data refreshed daily.
Dolphinfree
The official repo for “Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting”, ACL, 2025.
unstructuredopen-source
Open-source ETL for converting documents into structured data for language models
Metrics
| Dolphin | unstructured | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 9.1k | 15.5k |
| Star velocity /mo | 28.253968253968253 | 187.93650793650792 |
| Commits (90d) | 0 | 32 |
| Releases (6m) | 0 | 10 |
| Overall score | 0.23349701227865008 | 0.6743544689120442 |
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
- +Open-source with active community support and transparent development process
- +Purpose-built for AI/ML workflows with optimized output formats for language models
- +Supports multiple Python versions with extensive compatibility and regular updates
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
- -Requires Python programming knowledge and technical setup for implementation
- -May need additional configuration and tuning for specific document types or formats
- -Processing accuracy can vary depending on document complexity and quality
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
- •Preparing document collections for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and chatbots
- •Converting enterprise documents into structured datasets for AI training and analysis
- •Building automated content extraction pipelines for research and knowledge management
FAQ
- Which is more popular, Dolphin or unstructured?
- unstructured has more GitHub stars (15,527 vs 9,058).
- Which is more actively developed, Dolphin or unstructured?
- unstructured had more commits in the last 90 days (32 vs 0).
- Should I use Dolphin or unstructured?
- Compare their capabilities, limitations and "best for" notes above. Trying each on a small task is the fastest way to decide.