Docling
Open-source document conversion built for RAG pipelines
Docling is profiled here as a Document Processing tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
Docling is an open-source document conversion toolkit that IBM Research released in 2024 and donated to the LF AI and Data Foundation in 2025. It parses PDFs, Office files, images, and HTML into a unified DoclingDocument representation that preserves layout, reading order, and table structure, then exports Markdown or JSON for downstream pipelines. Everything runs locally, which keeps sensitive documents inside the network boundary. IBM also publishes Granite-Docling, a compact vision language model trained for the conversion pipeline, which handles complex page layouts end to end.
Key Capabilities:
PDF understanding with layout analysis and TableFormer table extraction
OCR support for scanned documents
Unified DoclingDocument format with Markdown, HTML, and JSON export
Visual language model pipeline for end-to-end page conversion
Native integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Haystack
MIT license with fully local, air-gapped execution
Alternative tools
- MinerU
Open-source engine converting documents to clean Markdown
- Reducto
Document ingestion API with structure-preserving extraction
- LlamaParse
Document parser built for retrieval and LLM pipelines
- Mathpix
OCR for math, science, and technical documents
- Marker
Convert PDFs and documents to clean Markdown at speed
- Unstructured
Turn raw documents into LLM-ready structured data