Marker

Apache-2.0 code, 38.7k GitHub stars, converts PDFs/DOCX/PPTX/XLSX to markdown/JSON

What Marker does

  • 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

Marker — straight answers

What is Marker?

Marker is listed under AI OCR & Document Extraction, in the Research & Learning category on Flocci AI Tools. Apache-2.0 code, 38.7k GitHub stars, converts PDFs/DOCX/PPTX/XLSX to markdown/JSON. It is free, with no paid plan attached, and it lives at github.com.

Is Marker free?

Marker is listed as fully free — there is no paid tier attached to it in the catalog. That makes it one of the 115 entries on Flocci AI Tools with no upgrade path built in.

What can Marker do?

Marker does 3 things the catalog singles out: 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.

What is the best free alternative to Marker?

Docling is the closest free alternative: it sits in the same AI OCR & Document Extraction sub-category and is free. olmOCR, AskYourPDF and Humata also start free. The full list is on the alternatives page.

See the full list →

Marker alternatives

Compare all alternatives →

AskYourPDF

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freemium
  • Chat with any PDF plus auto-fill PDF forms
  • Embeddable document chatbot for websites
  • 5M+ users including MIT/Harvard/Oxford/Stanford

PDF.ai

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freemium
  • Chat-with-PDF product plus a separate parse/extract/split PDF API
  • Popular ChatPDF-category alternative with API access for developers

Humata

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freemium
  • Free tier: 60 pages, 10 answers, no card
  • Cited answers across many uploaded files at once
  • Paid tiers priced per extra page rather than per seat

Mistral OCR 4

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freemium
  • Self-hostable single-container OCR model for regulated industries
  • 170 languages, bounding boxes and per-field confidence scores
  • Low per-thousand-page API pricing; free to try inside Le Chat

LlamaParse

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freemium
  • Parses 90+ formats incl. complex tables/charts/handwriting into clean markdown
  • 300,000+ users, 1B+ documents processed
  • Free trial credits via LlamaCloud, then usage-based

Reducto

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freemium
  • 15,000 free starter credits, no card required
  • Citation-ready structured JSON across 30+ file types
  • Edits extracted data back into original PDF/DOCX layout

Head-to-head comparisons