Feeding raw PDFs directly into AI agents often leads to poor performance due to unstructured or noisy text. This article benchmarks six popular PDF parsing tools—MinerU, Docling, Marker, Unstructured, PaddleOCR, and LlamaParse—evaluating them on accuracy, speed, and ease of integration. The comparison reveals that no single tool excels in all scenarios; for example, MinerU handles complex layouts well, while LlamaParse offers strong OCR capabilities. Developers building RAG systems or document automation pipelines will find this guide invaluable for selecting the right parser. The article also discusses trade-offs between open-source and commercial options, making it a practical resource for production deployments.
A practical comparison of six PDF parsing tools for AI agent pipelines, helping developers choose the best tool for structured data extraction.