Alternatives · Work · updated Oct 27, 2026
Surya alternatives
Surya ranks #3 of 7 for extract data from documents with an evidence score of 42/100. Its weak spot: The licence is not plain open source above a revenue line - read it before shipping. 6 other tools are ranked for the same job (extract data from documents); 2 score higher, 4 can be used free and 2 are open source. Same public signals as the ranking, recomputed nightly — nothing here is sponsored. Read the Surya review.
All 6 alternatives, ranked
evidence / 100
+ The connector list is the real product - S3, SharePoint, Confluence and Drive land as clean chunks.
− The open library's best parsing paths push you toward the paid API.
+ Reads a table as a table, and does it on your own machine with nothing sent anywhere.
− Heavy scanned documents want a GPU; CPU-only runs are slow on long PDFs.
+ Holds up on financial statements and forms where plain text extraction turns to soup.
− Per-page pricing and a cloud round trip; large archives add up fast.
+ Still the most accurate thing there is at equations, which general OCR gets wrong.
− Narrow by design - a plain business PDF is better served elsewhere.
+ Ships the boring half: approval steps, validation rules and exports to QuickBooks or SAP.
− Priced for finance teams, not for a side project.
+ Every block comes back with a page position, so an answer can cite exactly where it came from.
− API only and priced per page - no interface for someone doing this once.
Why switch?
Unstructured instead of Surya if
- you want the stronger public evidence (66 vs 42)
Docling instead of Surya if
- you want the stronger public evidence (64 vs 42)
- you need it on windows
- a bigger GitHub community matters (69,684 vs 21,542 stars)
LlamaParse instead of Surya if
- you need it on web
Free alternatives to Surya
4 of 6Open-source alternatives to Surya
2 of 6Where Surya ranks
Head to head: Unstructured vs Surya Docling vs Surya Surya vs LlamaParse