anydoc

anydoc converts Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF files into clean Markdown, with a median conversion under 5 milliseconds per document. The reason to care is feeding documents to an LLM without maintaining a pile of format-specific parsers. Every format parses into one shared document model and renders through a single Markdown serializer, so a table from a spreadsheet and a table from a Word file come out the same shape. MIT licensed.

The core is Rust with bindings for Node, Python, and the browser through WebAssembly, so install is a package manager one-liner in whichever language you already use. There is no server to run and no state to manage. Format detection reads file contents rather than trusting the extension, which means a mislabeled upload does not blow up the pipeline. Headings, lists, tables, footnotes, and cross-references survive the trip.

Free for everything local. Firecrawl sells a hosted product, Parse, which is the same conversion plus OCR models. That is the honest line: if your documents are scanned images rather than real files, you need OCR, and OCR is the paid side.

The catch is that "clean Markdown" is carrying weight. Heavily designed PDFs, multi-column layouts, and deeply nested tables remain hard, and no converter has fully solved them. Test it against your ugliest real document before you build a pipeline on top of it.