Unstructured vs Marker
Both are alternatives to AWS Textract. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Marker vs Unstructured — same comparison, one verdict.
Unstructured
One interface for every document format you will actually be handed.
Unstructured normalises an unusually wide range of inputs — PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML, email, EPUB, images — into a consistent element structure of titles, narrative text, tables and lists, ready for chunking. Breadth is the point: real corpora are never one format, and writing a parser per type is where ingestion projects stall. The open library is Apache-2.0 and runs locally; the company also sells a hosted API with additional models.
Marker
The best PDF-to-Markdown quality here — check the licence first.
Marker converts PDFs to Markdown with the highest fidelity of anything in this list: it handles equations, code blocks, tables and multi-column layouts, and optionally uses an LLM pass to improve difficult sections. For academic papers and technical documents the output quality is noticeably ahead. The caveat we would rather state than have you find in a licence review: Marker is GPL-3.0 with an additional revenue condition from its maintainer, so organisations above a revenue threshold need a commercial licence. Free for research and for smaller organisations, but not unconditionally.
Side by side
| Unstructured | Marker | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 90 | 70 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 with commercial revenue condition |
| Pricing | Open library free under Apache-2.0; a paid hosted API is offered separately. | Free below the maintainer's revenue threshold; a commercial licence is required above it. |
Unstructured edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Unstructured
Strengths
- +Widest input-format coverage of anything here
- +Consistent element output regardless of source format
- +Chunking strategies built in for RAG pipelines
- +Apache-2.0 open library
Trade-offs
- −Best-quality models sit in the paid hosted tier
- −Local install pulls in heavy system dependencies
- −Depth on complex PDFs is below Docling's
Marker
Strengths
- +Best PDF-to-Markdown fidelity of the options here
- +Handles equations, code blocks and complex tables well
- +Optional LLM pass for difficult pages
- +Runs entirely locally
Trade-offs
- −Not unconditionally open source — revenue-gated commercial terms
- −GPL-3.0 copyleft affects how you can distribute derived work
- −GPU strongly recommended for reasonable throughput
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Facts verified 2026-08-11. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.