Overview

Rating

10.0 / 10

Rating

Best For

Teams building AI agents that need accurate knowledge access

Best For

AI engineering and data teams that need accurate, scalable document ingestion for RAG pipelines

Product Summary

Accurate knowledge search that scales for AI agents — production-grade retrieval infrastructure.

Product Summary

Unstructured is the leading data-ingestion platform for RAG and AI apps, converting 65+ file formats (PDFs, DOCX, HTML, images, emails) into clean structured outputs ready for LLMs. Free open-source library plus a hosted Serverless API and Enterprise Platform with no-code UI, RBAC, SOC 2/HIPAA/GDPR support.

Starting Price

/monthPer monthly

Starting Price

$0Per forever

Free Trial

Yes

Free Trial

Yes

Free Version

Yes

Website

runcaptain.com

Website

unstructured.io

Key features

Core capabilities each platform advertises.

Captain

Scalable knowledge search
Agent-optimized retrieval
Production-grade infrastructure
Accuracy-focused

Unstructured

Ingests 65+ file formats: PDFs, DOCX, PPTX, HTML, images, emails
Table and form extraction preserving structure
Chunking strategies optimized for RAG (page, section, semantic)
API + SDK access with cloud or self-hosted deployment
Enterprise-grade compliance: SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, RBAC

Strengths and tradeoffs

What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.

Captain

Pros

Best-in-class accuracy — tops Open-RAG-Benchmark with 20%+ improvement over standard RAG
Turnkey setup with just two API calls to go from raw files to searchable knowledge base
Multimodal by default — handles text, images, tables, scanned documents, and complex PDFs
Broad data source integrations connecting to 1,000+ sources including S3, SharePoint, Confluence
SOC 2 Type II certified with enterprise-ready security from day one

Cons

Credit-based pricing varies significantly by document complexity, making budgeting unpredictable
Early-stage 2-person team may concern enterprises needing SLA guarantees
BYOC/on-prem deployment requires Enterprise plan with custom pricing

Unstructured

Pros

Generous free tier — 15,000 pages on Serverless API with no expiration
Supports 65+ file formats, the broadest in the space
Enterprise-ready: RBAC, audit, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR
No-code UI option alongside API for non-engineers
Battle-tested in Fortune 500 production RAG stacks

Cons

Captain or Unstructured — which should you choose?

Choose Captain if you wantChoose if you want

Agent knowledge retrieval
Enterprise search
Scalable RAG
Production retrieval systems

Choose Unstructured if you wantChoose if you want

Enterprise document ingestion pipelines feeding RAG systems
Financial and legal document processing at scale
Healthcare record digitization with HIPAA compliance
Knowledge base + intranet search ingestion
Fine-tuning dataset preparation from messy corpora

Compare Captain and Unstructured on your own traffic

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Captain vs Unstructured (2026)

Overview

Key features

Strengths and tradeoffs

What people are saying

Captain or Unstructured — which should you choose?

Compare Captain and Unstructured on your own traffic

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