# MinerU

6 Hacker News commenters recommended MinerU and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free open-source tool that turns PDFs into markdown, praised for extraction quality. Critics say it is heavy to run on consumer PCs and that some alternatives perform better.

## Why people recommend it

- Good PDF to markdown extraction (3 comments): "I’ve had good experiences with MinerU and PaddleOCR-VL" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49298968)) "hands-down the best PDF extraction tool I've ever used" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052745)) "MinerU works well to get it markdown" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48670682))

## What people warn about

- Heavy to run on consumer PCs (1 comments): "some local models are already quite good like MinerU. But it's too heavy to run on consumer-grade PC" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48133090))
- Trails some alternatives on performance (2 comments): "worse performance than many OSS offerings like Paddle, MinerU" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46331109)) "significantly better than MinerU" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46331884))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Pdfwithlove](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pdfwithlove.md): 10 recommend
- [qpdf](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qpdf.md): 8 recommend
- [PaperPilot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paperpilot.md): 8 recommend
- [Marker by Datalab](https://hackerapproved.com/p/marker.md): 6 recommend
- [Stirling PDF](https://hackerapproved.com/p/stirling-pdf.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

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