Marker by Datalab
Shares rank 4 of 7 PDF tools by recommenders
Converts PDFs and scans to Markdown with strong OCR accuracy and handling of many edge cases. Its most common caveat is that it is very slow.
Converts PDFs and scans to Markdown with strong OCR accuracy and handling of many edge cases. Its most common caveat is that it is very slow.
6 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Best OCR results overall
“By far the best OCR system, IME. The amount of annoying little edge cases they know about and cover for you is dizzying”
Comment from 15 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Sygal – Convert PDFs, scans and web pages to Markdown, locally” “marker (with --force-ocr) gives me the best results”
Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “Unlimited OCR: One-Shot Long-Horizon Parsing”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Very slow processing
“Docling and Marker work pretty well but are very slow”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “VR Is Not Dead”
Other PDF tools people recommend
The four most recommended other PDF tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pdfwithlove | 10 | 10 | 50% | 2 | — | — |
| qpdf | 8 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
| PaperPilot | 8 | 7 | 53% | 1 | — | — |
| Marker by DatalabThis page | 6 | 0 | 100% | 6 | — | — |
| MinerU | 6 | 1 | 86% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
All 6 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“By far the best OCR system, IME. The amount of annoying little edge cases they know about and cover for you is dizzying”
“Tasserect is the worst compare to PaddleOCR , Surya/Marker”
“marker (with --force-ocr) gives me the best results”
“Docling and Marker work pretty well but are very slow”
“The "stale symbol" detection is a nice touch”
“trains open-weight, state-of-the-art models for document intelligence”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.