pdfmux vs LlamaParse vs Docling vs Unstructured: Which PDF extractor for RAG in 2026?
Dev.to AI
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Generative AI
NLP
AI Research
TL;DR: For RAG pipelines in 2026, pick pdfmux if you need free, local, benchmark-proven extraction with per-page confidence scoring (0.905 on opendataloader-bench, overall). Pick LlamaParse if you process under 1,000 pages/day and your documents are non-sensitive - its free tier and complex-layout accuracy are hard to beat. Pick Docling if your documents are 90% tables and you want IBM-backed transformer extraction. Pick Unstructured if you ingest 25+ file formats beyond PDF and want a managed enterprise pipeline. Most teams should default to pdfmux.