MinerU
Shares rank 4 of 7 PDF tools by recommenders
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.
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.
7 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 86%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 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
Good PDF to markdown extraction
“I’ve had good experiences with MinerU and PaddleOCR-VL”
Comment from 14 Aug 2026 in “Mistral OCR 4.1” “hands-down the best PDF extraction tool I've ever used”
Comment from 26 Nov 2025 in “Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI” “MinerU works well to get it markdown”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Heavy to run on consumer PCs
“some local models are already quite good like MinerU. But it's too heavy to run on consumer-grade PC”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “Show HN: I built a local-first Web-to-EPUB tool after Omnivore shut down” Trails some alternatives on performance
“worse performance than many OSS offerings like Paddle, MinerU”
Comment from 19 Dec 2025 in “Mistral OCR 3” “significantly better than MinerU”
Comment from 19 Dec 2025 in “Mistral OCR 3”
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 | — | — |
| MinerUThis page | 6 | 1 | 86% | 6 | — | — |
| Marker by Datalab | 6 | 0 | 100% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
All 7 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I’ve had good experiences with MinerU and PaddleOCR-VL”
“MinerU works well to get it markdown”
“some local models are already quite good like MinerU. But it's too heavy to run on consumer-grade PC”
“they run at 1-5 pages/s because of the VLMs under the hood”
“significantly better than MinerU”
“worse performance than many OSS offerings like Paddle, MinerU”
“hands-down the best PDF extraction tool I've ever used”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.