# MarkItDown by Microsoft

7 Hacker News commenters recommended MarkItDown by Microsoft and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for converting documents to Markdown, especially as clean raw text for LLM agents, and say it works well most of the time.

## Why people recommend it

- Clean Markdown output for LLM agents (2 comments): "which is not only token efficient but also llms are pretty good at creating hierarchies from markdown" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46351658)) "markitdown is solid when you mostly want raw text out for agents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47735595))
- Works well most of the time (2 comments): "it does a great job 95% of the time in my experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46745838)) "which I've found to work really well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668722))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Tesseract OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tesseract.md): 32 recommend
- [Docling](https://hackerapproved.com/p/docling.md): 19 recommend
- [Mozilla Readability](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mozilla-readability.md): 10 recommend
- [Zpdf](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zpdf.md): 8 recommend
- [Azure Document Intelligence](https://hackerapproved.com/p/azure-document-intelligence.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

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