Updated April 29, 2026
Accurate knowledge search that scales for AI agents — production-grade retrieval infrastructure.
Docling is IBM's open-source document conversion toolkit (Apache 2.0) that turns PDFs, DOCX, PPTX, and other formats into structured JSON or markdown using advanced layout analysis and table structure recognition. Now ships with Granite-Docling-258M — IBM's compact vision-language model purpose-built for accurate document conversion — and was donated to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation in 2026.
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
Granite-Docling-258M is purpose-built for accurate and efficient document conversion, unlike most VLM-based approaches that adapt large general-purpose models.
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