Docling
Document extractionIBM's open-source library for parsing documents into a structured, AI-ready representation.
Docling converts documents into a clean, structured representation that keeps what matters: reading order, tables, headings, and layout. It handles PDFs, office formats, and images, and exports to Markdown or JSON.
It is open-source from IBM Research, runs locally, and is built to slot directly into RAG and agent pipelines as the parsing step.
Where it's ideally used
A strong fit when you want high-quality, fully local document parsing with no data leaving your environment.
Where it doesn't fit
Not a full ingestion platform — for managed connectors and scale you will reach for something with a hosted service.