Also published on Medium: https://medium.com/@samaanmohammed/pdf-to-markdown-on-apify-pdf-text-extractor-against-pdf-to-markdown-ocr-with-prices-e2c42339c0e1
We built one of the two tools compared here. Prices and user counts are from the public Apify pages on 27 October 2026.
If you feed PDFs to a retrieval pipeline or an LLM, you need clean Markdown, the page structure and a way to handle scanned pages. Two Apify actors do this. The one with more users is gochujang/pdf-text-extractor. The other is leadharbor/pdf-to-markdown-ocr, which is ours.
The leader
gochujang/pdf-text-extractor had 273 total users and 2,080 runs. Its listing says it extracts text, Markdown or RAG chunks, detects tables, and can optionally OCR scanned pages.
Its current price, in effect since 22 September 2026, is a start fee of $0.001, $0.02 per PDF and $0.001 per page. The pricing data has no separate OCR charge, so the listing does not tell you what an OCR page costs. Check the actor page before you run it on scans.
pdf-to-markdown-ocr
It returns one Markdown document per PDF and one entry per page. It also returns heading-based chunks with an approximate token count (characters divided by four) and a quality report for each file.
Pages with a text layer are read directly. Pages that are only pictures go through OCR. English and Arabic come built in. Any other OCR language is downloaded when a run needs it and is marked experimental. Arabic text comes back in reading order, first word first.
The quality report sets needsReview to true when an OCR page has a confidence under 70, when a page fails a text check, or when a page could not be read. A false value does not mean the file is correct.
Price
$0.004 per PDF converted and $0.007 per page read by OCR. Pages with a text layer add nothing per page. A file that fails, or a partial file, is not charged the PDF fee. Our README gives this example: a 20-page scan costs 20 x $0.007 + $0.004 = $0.144.
The same job at the published prices (our arithmetic, not measured runs):
| Job | pdf-text-extractor | pdf-to-markdown-ocr |
|---|---|---|
| 10-page text PDF | $0.031 | $0.004 |
| 100-page text PDF | $0.121 | $0.004 |
| 20-page scan, every page OCR | not stated in the listing | $0.144 |
The leader figures assume one PDF per run: $0.001 start, $0.02 for the PDF, and $0.001 for each page.
Quality
Our own benchmark uses 8 files, run locally with the same code as the Apify image. On an Arabic text PDF, word F1 was 0.987 raw and 1.000 with the page-marker lines removed. The scans are clean renders and the set is small, so this measures those files only. We have not run the leader on these files, so we make no quality claim against it.
Which one to pick
- Text PDFs, many files, cost matters most: pdf-to-markdown-ocr is cheaper per file at these prices.
- You want an actor with a longer public record: the leader has more users and more runs.
- Scanned pages, and you want a confidence score for each page: pdf-to-markdown-ocr reports one. Check the leader's OCR behaviour and price before you pick it for scans.
Limits
- Up to 100 links per run, 25 MB per file. The default is 100 pages per file, and the maximum is 500.
- A conversion that makes no progress for 3 minutes, or runs past 30 minutes in total, returns the pages it finished, marked partial.
- Skew up to 7 degrees is straightened. Stronger tilts, curved pages and mixed orientation on one page are not handled.
- We have 2 users so far and no outside reviews. Test it on your own files first.
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