# Docling

19 Hacker News commenters recommended Docling and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free open-source tool that turns PDFs and tables into markdown and text with traceable positions. Complex tables and multi-column layouts can lose structure, and it is slow.

## Why people recommend it

- Good at PDF and table extraction (4 comments): "I was shocked at how good it was at the couple document extraction tasks I threw it at." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47962012)) "Docling and MinerU are great for structured output like markdown and table extraction" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47753206)) "it works well for parsing PDF and XLSX" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271087))
- Recommended as a starting point (3 comments): "I suggest take a look at this https://github.com/docling-project/docling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49562761)) "there are options like Docling or LlamaParse for proper preprocessing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515128)) "If you are starting new I would recommend looking at docling." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619455))
- Converts documents to markdown and text (2 comments): "Docling and MinerU are great for structured output like markdown and table extraction" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47753206)) "did an astounding job of converting it all into .txt and .md" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48976812))
- Loads many formats including spreadsheets (2 comments): "It loads .xls, .xlsx, .csv and 50+ more formats" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50247277)) "it works well for parsing PDF and XLSX" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271087))

## What people warn about

- Poor results with other models (2 comments): "Using docling with different models has produced much worse results." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632406)) "docling (gives me garbage, I must use it wrong)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644377))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Tesseract OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tesseract.md): 32 recommend
- [Mozilla Readability](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mozilla-readability.md): 10 recommend
- [Zpdf](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zpdf.md): 8 recommend
- [MarkItDown by Microsoft](https://hackerapproved.com/p/markitdown.md): 7 recommend
- [Azure Document Intelligence](https://hackerapproved.com/p/azure-document-intelligence.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Docling", https://hackerapproved.com/p/docling/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).