Head to head · Work · updated Oct 27, 2026
Surya vs LlamaParse
Surya scores 42 to LlamaParse's 18 on public evidence for extract data from documents, and they rank #3 and #4 there. Both are free to start. Numbers below are the same public signals the ranking uses, recomputed nightly — nothing here is sponsored.
Surya
OCR, layout and reading-order models covering 90+ languages, weights included.
+ Beats the old OCR engines on messy scans and non-Latin scripts, locally.
− The licence is not plain open source above a revenue line - read it before shipping.
LlamaParse
Parsing service aimed at the documents that break parsers: nested tables, forms, figures.
+ 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.
Side by side
public evidence| Surya | LlamaParse | |
|---|---|---|
| Evidence score / 100 | 42 | 18 |
| GitHub stars | 21,542 | closed source |
| Hacker News stories, 30d | 0 | 1 |
| Release-feed mentions, 30d | 0 | 0 |
| Last activity | 4 days ago | – |
| Pricing | Open source · Weights are free for research and small companies; a commercial licence applies above a revenue threshold | Free tier · Free pages each day, then per-page credits |
| Platforms | cli, api, linux, mac | api, web |
| Maker | Datalab | LlamaIndex |
Which one?
Pick Surya if
- you want the stronger public evidence (42 vs 18)
- you want open source — self-host it, read it, fork it
- you need it on cli, linux, mac
- a bigger GitHub community matters (21,542 vs 0 stars)
Best for scanned archives in languages Tesseract mangles.
Pick LlamaParse if
- you need it on web
Best for a few thousand hard PDFs rather than a million easy ones.