PixelRAG alternatives
Curated alternatives to PixelRAG — and why you'd switch.
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 switchTwo answers to the same RAG-ingestion problem: MinerU parses PDFs/Office through layout analysis and OCR into LLM-ready markdown; PixelRAG skips parsing entirely and retrieves over rendered screenshot tiles. Parse-to-text vs stay-in-pixels.
Full comparison →olmocr
Open toolkit that linearizes messy PDFs — scans, tables, equations, handwriting — into clean ordered Markdown with a self-hosted vision-language model. Built for LLM training data and RAG ingestion.
Why switcholmocr linearizes messy PDFs into clean ordered Markdown so a text pipeline can index them; PixelRAG argues the linearization step is the loss — embed the page image and let a VLM read the tile directly.
Full comparison →