Docling
Open-source toolkit that converts PDFs, Office files and images into structured markdown or JSON for AI pipelines. v2.139.0 released Oct 14.
Is it actually free? Free
Free under the MIT license. You install it with pip and run it locally or in your own pipeline.
Pricing
Free and open source (MIT license).
Best for
Developers feeding documents into RAG or agent pipelines.
Not great for
People who want a point-and-click app.
Alternatives
Indra OCR
Datalab's OCR model that turns scans and PDFs into markdown on a plain CPU, first published Oct 10–13.
LightOnOCR-3
LightOn's Apache-2.0 OCR models (0.8B, 1B and 4B) that transcribe pages and can also return layout boxes and chart tables.