Docling
IBM-grade document understanding
Document AI & OCRDocument parsing toolkitMITRuns locallyPythonIntermediate
🐳 Docker pulls
📦 PyPI downloads / month
📦 npm downloads / month
🚀 Latest release ·
What is Docling?
Docling parses PDFs, DOCX, PPTX and images into structured representations with layout, tables and reading order, designed to plug straight into RAG frameworks.
Why people choose Docling
- Rich structured output: layout, tables, reading order
- First-class integrations with LangChain and LlamaIndex
- Backed by IBM Research, MIT-licensed
Docling at a glance
| Category | Document AI & OCR |
| Type | Document parsing toolkit |
| License | MIT |
| Runs locally | Yes |
| Built with | Python |
| Skill level | Intermediate |
| Best for | teams building document pipelines for RAG |
Latest releases
Open-source alternatives to Docling
Other open-source document ai & ocr tools worth comparing:
MarkerConvert PDFs to clean Markdown fastSuryaModern OCR with layout detection
PaddleOCRIndustrial OCR with tiny models
UnstructuredTurn any file into LLM-ready data
FirecrawlTurn websites into LLM-ready Markdown
Crawl4AIOpen-source LLM-friendly crawler
olmOCRTurn PDFs into clean training-grade text
MinerUPDF to Markdown with formulas and tables
TesseractThe classic OCR engineDocling head-to-head
Docling vs MarkerDocling vs SuryaDocling vs PaddleOCRDocling vs UnstructuredDocling vs FirecrawlDocling vs Crawl4AIDocling vs olmOCRDocling vs MinerUDocling vs Tesseract
FAQ
Is Docling free?
Docling is free and open-source (MIT license), so you can use, self-host and modify it at no cost.
Can I run Docling locally?
Yes. Docling is designed to run on your own machine or server, keeping your data private.
What is the best alternative to Docling?
Popular open-source alternatives include Marker, Surya, PaddleOCR. See the comparisons above to choose.
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