kreuzberg

Kreuzberg rips text, metadata, and structured data out of 91+ file formats. PDFs, Word docs, images, source code in 248 languages, you name it. The Rust core makes it fast, and bindings exist for Python, Node.js, Go, Ruby, Java, and C#. Completely open source under the Elastic License.

Deploying it is straightforward: Docker container, CLI binary, REST API, or even an MCP server for AI tool chains. The image is around 1.3GB because of OCR backends (Tesseract, PaddleOCR), but once it's running, it handles batch processing with configurable parallelism and streaming for large files.

Solo devs building document pipelines get immediate value. Teams doing search indexing or RAG will appreciate the format coverage, since most alternatives force you to stitch together multiple libraries. One tool that handles everything from scanned receipts to source code.

The catch: the Elastic License means you can't offer it as a managed service without a commercial agreement. Building an internal tool? You're fine. Reselling document extraction? Talk to their team first.