Head to head · Work · updated Oct 27, 2026
Unstructured vs Surya
Unstructured scores 66 to Surya's 42 on public evidence for extract data from documents, and they rank #1 and #3 there. Both are free to start. Numbers below are the same public signals the ranking uses, recomputed nightly — nothing here is sponsored.
Unstructured
Ingest library and hosted pipeline that normalises 25+ file types into chunks for retrieval.
+ 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.
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.
Side by side
public evidence| Unstructured | Surya | |
|---|---|---|
| Evidence score / 100 | 66 | 42 |
| GitHub stars | 15,628 | 21,542 |
| Hacker News stories, 30d | 7 | 0 |
| Release-feed mentions, 30d | 0 | 0 |
| Last activity | 0 days ago | 4 days ago |
| Pricing | Open source · Apache 2.0 core; the hosted platform and connectors are paid | Open source · Weights are free for research and small companies; a commercial licence applies above a revenue threshold |
| Platforms | cli, api, linux, mac | cli, api, linux, mac |
| Maker | Unstructured | Datalab |
Which one?
Pick Unstructured if
- you want the stronger public evidence (66 vs 42)
Best for a RAG pipeline that has to swallow a company's whole file share.
Pick Surya if
Beats the old OCR engines on messy scans and non-Latin scripts, locally.
Best for scanned archives in languages Tesseract mangles.