Free
Added on Oct 25,2026
ParseCrate is an open-source, self-hosted document processing API that converts PDFs, Office files and HTML into structured content. It runs on your own server and is built on Docling and docling-serve.
It accepts PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX and HTML files, either as uploads or from source URLs, and returns Markdown, JSON or HTML output.
Key features include OCR for scanned documents, layout and reading-order extraction, and table recognition. Conversion can run synchronously for suitable jobs or asynchronously for longer ones.
It provides hierarchical and hybrid chunking endpoints for retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. You supply your own embedding models, vector storage and retrieval logic, and a companion service called EmbedCrate handles embeddings and optional reranking.
It is deployed with Docker, with CPU images for amd64 and arm64 and an optional NVIDIA GPU image. Models are included in the image and load on startup, and it can run fully offline using pre-cached models.
Requests are authenticated with an API key header, and an optional web playground with persistent storage can be switched on. A Google Colab demo notebook is available for trying it out.
Pricing: ParseCrate is free under the MIT licence. You pay only for your own hardware or cloud hosting, and the site does not offer a hosted conversion service.
It is suited to developers and teams building search, RAG or archiving applications who want to keep document processing on infrastructure they control.
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