pdf-inspector alternatives
Curated alternatives to pdf-inspector — and why you'd switch.
xberg
Rust-core extraction orchestrator with 15 language bindings: 96 formats — PDF, Office, images, audio, code, web — to clean text, tables and RAG-ready chunks. OCR and structured extraction built in.
Why switchBoth are deterministic Rust document engines with multi-language bindings. xberg goes wide — 96 formats into RAG-ready chunks; pdf-inspector goes deep on one format with classification, confidence scores and OCR routing.
Full comparison →opendataloader-pdf
Deterministic PDF parser for AI pipelines: #1 extraction accuracy (0.907) on its public bench, bounding boxes on every element, 0.015s/page — plus the first open PDF auto-tagging for accessibility.
Why switchKindred no-ML philosophy, different depth — pdf-inspector triages and extracts in 200ms; OpenDataLoader does full layout analysis with bounding boxes. Notably, pdf-inspector benchmarks itself on opendataloader-bench: same yardstick, acknowledged rivalry.
Full comparison →MinerU
Heavyweight document-to-markdown/JSON parser — PDFs plus Office (docx/pptx/xlsx) through layout analysis and OCR into LLM-ready output for RAG and agentic pipelines. 73k stars, self-hostable.
Why switchSame PDF-to-Markdown slot, opposite weight: MinerU runs full layout analysis and OCR on everything; pdf-inspector is the 200ms no-ML path for documents that don't need it. Many pipelines should front MinerU with exactly this triage.
Full comparison →