What is docslight?

compdf/docslight — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

★ 50VueAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5LicenseSetup · moderate

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((DocSlight))
    What it does
      Parses PDFs and Office files
      OCR for 80 plus languages
      Structured field extraction
    Modes
      Local free mode
      Cloud API mode
      Web UI via Docker
    Tech stack
      Python
      Vue
      Docker
    Use cases
      RAG pipelines
      Invoice processing
      Contract analysis
    Audience
      Developers
      Enterprise IT teams

mindmap root((DocSlight)) What it does Parses PDFs and Office files OCR for 80 plus languages Structured field extraction Modes Local free mode Cloud API mode Web UI via Docker Tech stack Python Vue Docker Use cases RAG pipelines Invoice processing Contract analysis Audience Developers Enterprise IT teams

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Convert a folder of invoices or contracts into structured JSON for downstream processing.

USE CASE 2

Feed parsed document text into a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline or knowledge base.

USE CASE 3

Give an AI agent a tool to read and extract data from PDFs, scans, or Office files.

USE CASE 4

Run a local, no-account document parser instead of sending files to a third-party cloud service.

What is it built with?

PythonVueDockerOCR

How does it compare?

	compdf/docslight	ageerle/ruoyi-drama	huangdihd/call_me_as_agent
Stars	50	50	50
Language	Vue	Vue	Vue
Setup difficulty	moderate	hard	easy
Complexity	3/5	4/5	2/5
Audience	developer	developer	developer

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Local mode needs your own LLM for some extraction features, cloud mode needs a ComPDF account and API key.

You can use and modify this freely, but if you distribute a modified version of the library itself, you must release those changes under the same license.

So what is it?

DocSlight is an open source tool that reads documents such as PDFs, scanned pages, images, and Office files like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and turns them into structured data you can use elsewhere, such as Markdown or JSON. It is part of a larger product family from the company behind ComPDF. Rather than just extracting raw text the way older OCR tools do, it combines AI-based parsing, text recognition for more than 80 languages with automatic language detection, and structured field extraction that can point back to exactly where on the page a value came from. The README lists its intended uses as building blocks for retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and knowledge bases, processing invoices, analyzing contracts and pulling out specific clauses, giving AI agents a tool to read documents, and broader enterprise document automation. There are two ways to run it. Local mode runs entirely on your own machine for free and needs no account, though some extraction features require you to supply your own local AI model. Cloud mode sends documents to the company's hosted service using an API key you generate after signing up, and offers higher accuracy plus a free usage quota. Either way you install it with pip and run a single parse command from the command line, or you can clone the repository and start a browser-based interface with Docker Compose that lets you drag and drop files. Beyond the open source Lite edition, the company also sells an Enterprise edition, available as a hosted service or a self-hosted deployment, that adds things like uploading from cloud storage or a scanner and batch processing. The project is released under the GNU LGPL v3 license. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Install docslight with pip and parse this invoice.pdf into Markdown using local mode.

Prompt 2

Explain the difference between DocSlight's local mode and cloud mode based on its README.

Prompt 3

Set up DocSlight's Web UI with Docker Compose so I can drag and drop files to parse.

Prompt 4

Compare DocSlight's Lite and Enterprise editions for a document automation project.

Frequently asked questions