MinerUHeavyweight 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 switchBoth turn documents (PDFs, Office) into LLM-ready text/JSON for RAG. MinerU is a heavyweight Python/VLM parser tuned for max-fidelity layout + OCR; Xberg is a polyglot extraction orchestrator — 96 formats, 15 language bindings, its own ONNX/Candle/VLM OCR — with a plugin layer that can run MinerU as a backend. Pick MinerU alone for the hardest scanned PDFs; Xberg when you need breadth, many languages, or one pipeline that calls MinerU only where it earns it.
Full comparison → olmocrOpen 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 switchSame end goal — clean, ordered Markdown from PDFs for RAG/training ingestion. olmocr is a dedicated self-hosted vision-language model that excels on scans, tables and handwriting; Xberg is a general extraction framework with its own OCR (ONNX, Candle, or any VLM via LiteLLM) and a plugin layer where olmocr could sit as one backend. Use olmocr when OCR quality is the bottleneck, Xberg when you need many formats and language bindings.
Full comparison → pdf-inspectorFirecrawl's Rust PDF triage: classifies text-based vs scanned in ~10-50ms, extracts positioned text and clean Markdown without OCR — routing the ~54% of PDFs that never needed a model.
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 → Unlimited-OCRBaidu's open OCR VLM that parses entire multi-page documents in one shot — 'unlimited' long-horizon parsing pushing DeepSeek-OCR further. MIT weights on HF; serve via transformers, vLLM or SGLang.
Why switchEngine vs model: xberg parses 96 formats deterministically; Unlimited-OCR throws a VLM at whole documents. Same slot in a RAG ingestion pipeline.
Full comparison → OfficeCLIOffice suite built for AI agents: one binary, no Office install, creates, reads and edits Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and renders them to HTML/PNG so the agent can see what it made. Ships as a skill.
Why switchXberg extracts 96 formats including Office into clean text and chunks; OfficeCLI is the other direction — an agent authoring and editing Office files with a render loop. Overlap is only on reading.
Full comparison →