What is the best free alternative to Dolphin (ByteDance)?
olmOCR is the closest free alternative to Dolphin (ByteDance): same AI OCR & Document Extraction sub-category, and it is free. Apache 2.0 open-source OCR toolkit from Ai2, 19.3k GitHub stars
Best free Dolphin (ByteDance) alternatives
Looking for a free alternative to Dolphin (ByteDance)? Here are 9 ai ocr & document extraction worth trying — 9 with a free tier. Dolphin (ByteDance) itself is free.
| Tool | Dolphin (ByteDance) (you searched) | olmOCR | Docling | Marker |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | free | free | free | free |
| Best for | Two-stage document-type and layout analysis then element parsing | Apache 2.0 open-source OCR toolkit from Ai2, 19.3k GitHub stars | MIT-licensed, 64.7k GitHub stars, IBM Research-originated, now under LF AI & Data Foundation | Apache-2.0 code, 38.7k GitHub stars, converts PDFs/DOCX/PPTX/XLSX to markdown/JSON |
| Visit | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ |
Dolphin (ByteDance) alternatives — straight answers
Are there free Dolphin (ByteDance) alternatives?
Yes — 9 of the 9 alternatives listed here are free or freemium: olmOCR, Docling, Marker, MarkItDown, LangExtract (Google). None of them are paid-only.
Is Dolphin (ByteDance) free?
Dolphin (ByteDance) is free. There is no paid plan attached to it in the catalog.
How were these Dolphin (ByteDance) alternatives chosen?
They are the other tools in AI OCR & Document Extraction, then the rest of Research & Learning, ordered free tiers first and capped at 9. There is no sponsorship and no paid placement in that ordering — only the pricing tier decides.
All Dolphin (ByteDance) alternatives
Browse AI OCR & Document Extraction →olmOCR
AI OCR & Document Extraction
✦ WhyA Dolphin (ByteDance) alternative — Apache 2.0 open-source OCR toolkit from Ai2, 19.3k GitHub stars.
- Apache 2.0 open-source OCR toolkit from Ai2, 19.3k GitHub stars
- Vision-language-model based, handles equations/tables/multi-column layout
- Runs at a fraction of commercial OCR cost on a 7B model
Docling
AI OCR & Document Extraction
✦ WhyA Dolphin (ByteDance) alternative — MIT-licensed, 64.7k GitHub stars, IBM Research-originated, now under LF AI & Data Foundation.
- MIT-licensed, 64.7k GitHub stars, IBM Research-originated, now under LF AI & Data Foundation
- Advanced PDF layout + table structure recognition, local execution
- Exports to Markdown/HTML/JSON, integrates with LangChain/LlamaIndex
Marker
AI OCR & Document Extraction
✦ WhyA Dolphin (ByteDance) alternative — Apache-2.0 code, 38.7k GitHub stars, converts PDFs/DOCX/PPTX/XLSX to markdown/JSON.
- Apache-2.0 code, 38.7k GitHub stars, converts PDFs/DOCX/PPTX/XLSX to markdown/JSON
- 76.0% accuracy on the olmocr-bench benchmark
- Runs on GPU, CPU, or Apple Silicon; optional LLM-boosted accuracy mode
✦ WhyA Dolphin (ByteDance) alternative — Converts PDF, Office files, images, audio and HTML into LLM-friendly Markdown.
- Converts PDF, Office files, images, audio and HTML into LLM-friendly Markdown
- Ships an MCP server for agents
- Open-source Python package and CLI
- Optional LLM-based image description
✦ WhyA Dolphin (ByteDance) alternative — Python library extracting structured data from unstructured text with LLMs.
- Python library extracting structured data from unstructured text with LLMs
- Maps each extraction to its exact source span
- Works with Gemini, OpenAI and local Ollama models
- Interactive HTML visualization of results
✦ WhyA Dolphin (ByteDance) alternative — Parses PDFs, images and Office files into Markdown, JSON, HTML or LaTeX.
- Parses PDFs, images and Office files into Markdown, JSON, HTML or LaTeX
- Runs fully locally with OCR, table and formula recognition
- Free hosted web app at mineru.net plus agent-ready outputs
- Version 4.0 adds four parsing quality tiers
✦ WhyA Dolphin (ByteDance) alternative — 3B vision-language model for layout parsing across many scripts.
- 3B vision-language model for layout parsing across many scripts
- Converts charts and diagrams into SVG code
- Scores 83.9 on olmOCR-bench
- MIT licensed with free live demo
✦ WhyA Dolphin (ByteDance) alternative — Vision-language OCR that compresses document context optically.
- Vision-language OCR that compresses document context optically
- Document-to-Markdown, layout detection and figure parsing
- Multiple resolution modes up to 1280x1280
- MIT license; DeepSeek-OCR2 released Jan 2026
✦ WhyA Dolphin (ByteDance) alternative — 1B-parameter document parsing VLM (NaViT encoder + ERNIE-4.5-0.3B).
- 1B-parameter document parsing VLM (NaViT encoder + ERNIE-4.5-0.3B)
- Handles text, tables, formulas, charts and handwriting
- Supports 109 languages including Hindi and Arabic
- Apache 2.0; newer PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 available