Keywords AI

Docling vs Unstructured

Compare Docling and Unstructured side by side. Both are tools in the RAG Frameworks category.

Quick Comparison

Docling
Docling
Unstructured
Unstructured
CategoryRAG FrameworksRAG Frameworks
PricingOpen SourceFreemium
Best ForDevelopers and researchers who need accurate document parsing with layout and table understandingEnterprises that need to extract structured data from large volumes of unstructured documents
Websitegithub.comunstructured.io
Key Features
  • Document parsing with layout understanding
  • Table extraction from PDFs
  • OCR for scanned documents
  • Multiple output formats
  • Open-source and self-hosted
  • Ingests 25+ file formats
  • Table and form extraction
  • Chunking strategies for RAG
  • API and SDK access
  • Cloud and self-hosted deployment
Use Cases
  • PDF to structured data conversion
  • Academic paper processing
  • Financial report extraction
  • Scanned document digitization
  • Document understanding pipelines
  • Enterprise document ingestion pipelines
  • RAG data preparation from PDFs and docs
  • Financial document processing
  • Healthcare record digitization
  • Legal document analysis

When to Choose Docling vs Unstructured

Docling
Choose Docling if you need
  • PDF to structured data conversion
  • Academic paper processing
  • Financial report extraction
Pricing: Open Source
Unstructured
Choose Unstructured if you need
  • Enterprise document ingestion pipelines
  • RAG data preparation from PDFs and docs
  • Financial document processing
Pricing: Freemium

About Docling

Docling is IBM's open-source document conversion toolkit that transforms PDFs, DOCX, PPTX, and other document formats into structured JSON or markdown. It uses advanced layout analysis and table structure recognition to preserve document structure, making it ideal for preparing documents for RAG and LLM applications. Docling integrates with LlamaIndex and LangChain for seamless pipeline construction.

About Unstructured

Unstructured is the leading data ingestion platform for AI applications, transforming unstructured data—PDFs, Word documents, HTML, images, emails—into clean, structured formats ready for LLM consumption and RAG pipelines. The platform handles document parsing, OCR, table extraction, and chunking with high accuracy. Available as open-source and a managed API service, Unstructured is used by enterprises to prepare large document corpora for AI processing.

What is RAG Frameworks?

Frameworks and tools for building retrieval-augmented generation pipelines—document parsing, chunking, indexing, and query engines that connect LLMs to your data.

Browse all RAG Frameworks tools →

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