Is MinerU still AGPL-licensed?

No, not since its 3.1.0 release. MinerU moved to a custom MinerU Open Source License built on Apache-2.0. It's free below 100 million monthly active users, or $20 million in monthly revenue, counting your affiliates. It also requires naming MinerU in any service you build on it.

Does MinerU need a GPU?

Only for its higher-accuracy backends. The pipeline backend runs on CPU. The VLM and hybrid-engine backends need a GPU, or Apple's mlx, for realistic throughput.

What makes MinerU's OCR different from the others here?

It bundles OCR recognition across 109 languages by default. That's the broadest language list of the five projects on this page, and it matters most for non-Latin and CJK-script documents.

txtfetch vs MinerU

MinerU is an open-source library you run yourself. txtfetch is one HTTP call. Here's an honest look at the licence, the operational cost, and where each one wins.

What MinerU is

MinerU is built by OpenDataLab. A VLM-and-OCR document parser with the broadest native OCR language coverage of the five.

MinerU moved off AGPL-3.0 in its 3.1.0 release to a custom licence built on top of Apache-2.0. Commercial use is free below two thresholds: 100 million monthly active users, or $20 million in monthly revenue. Both thresholds count your affiliates too. Cross either one and you need a separate commercial licence. The licence also requires you to name MinerU in any product or service you build on it. MinerU changed licences this recently, so double-check which version, and which licence, you are actually pinning.

Licence checked 2026-09. See the project's own LICENSE file.

Checked against the project's own LICENSE file, not a summary of it. A licence can change between releases, so check the LICENSE of the exact version you pin, not this page. This is a factual summary, not legal advice.

at a glance

MinerU

Code licence: MinerU Open Source License, a custom licence based on Apache-2.0
Model-weights licence: Covered by the same MinerU Open Source License as the code
Install: pip install mineru (or an extras variant). Model weights download from Hugging Face or ModelScope on first run.
Model weights: A VLM model (around 1.2B parameters in its current release) plus an OCR model stack, both downloaded on first use.
GPU: Depends on the backend. The CPU-capable pipeline backend runs without one; the higher-accuracy VLM and hybrid-engine backends need a GPU (or Apple mlx) for realistic throughput. Several Chinese domestic AI accelerators are also supported directly.
Formats: Native PDF, DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX parsing, plus images, per the project's README.
Output: Markdown and JSON, with formulas converted to LaTeX and tables to HTML.
OCR: A dual VLM-plus-OCR engine with 109-language OCR recognition. That's the broadest bundled OCR language list of the five.

txtfetch

Code licence: N/A — hosted API, no code to license
Model-weights licence: N/A — no weights on your infrastructure
Install: None. One HTTP call.
Model weights: None on your side. Tika and Tesseract run on ours.
GPU: None needed. quality=premium routes to a VLM on our infrastructure.
Formats: Every format on the coverage list, one endpoint.
Output: Text, Markdown, or element JSON.
OCR: Standard tier: eng, osd. quality=premium for a hard scan. See /languages.

capability table

Capability	MinerU	txtfetch
Hosting	self-hosted only	hosted API*
Ships neural model weights	+	–
GPU required	~	–*
Table extraction	+	+
OCR engine bundled	+	+*
Structured or JSON output	+	+*
Built-in chunking for RAG	–	–*
Single HTTP endpoint	~	+

* txtfetch notes: One HTTP call. No install, no model download, no server to run and patch. The standard tier runs on Tika and Tesseract, CPU only. quality=premium routes a document to a vision-language model on our infrastructure, not yours. The standard OCR tier ships English trained data plus script detection only (TESSDATA_LANGS=eng osd). See /languages for the per-language detail and quality=premium for a hard scan. ?format=markdown and ?format=json ship today. Schema-defined field extraction, pulling named fields to your own schema, is on the roadmap, not shipped yet. txtfetch returns text, Markdown, or element JSON. Chunking stays a caller-side step, the same reasoning behind every guide on /fixes.

No accuracy or speed figure is measured against MinerU on this page. See /benchmarks for txtfetch's own measured numbers and their caveats.

where mineru wins

109-language OCR recognition, bundled by default. That's the strongest coverage of the five for non-Latin and CJK scripts.
Cross-page table merging and reading-order reconstruction aimed specifically at complex, multi-page layouts.
Native parsing of PDF, DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX without first converting through PDF, unlike tools that only read Office formats via a conversion step.
Multiple backend choices (a CPU-only pipeline, plus GPU-backed VLM and hybrid engines) so you can trade cost against accuracy per workload.

the work you still own

MinerU is free to run. Running it in production is a separate job. This is the checklist that job includes.

Downloading and caching MinerU's VLM and OCR model weights, and provisioning a GPU if you need the higher-accuracy backends at real volume.
Naming MinerU in your product or service, a condition the licence attaches to any online service built on it.
Tracking your own combined monthly active users and revenue against the licence's 100 million MAU / $20 million revenue thresholds.
Patching MinerU and its model stack, and re-reading the licence on every upgrade, since it changed once already in 2026.

where txtfetch wins

One HTTP call. No install, no model download, no GPU to provision, and no server to patch.
The standard OCR tier ships English trained data plus script detection only (TESSDATA_LANGS=eng osd). See /languages for the per-language detail, and request quality=premium for a hard non-English scan.
A durable free tier (500 documents/month, ongoing), so trying it costs nothing and no card.

txtfetch strips HTML markup, not boilerplate, the same as /fixes describes it. Nav, footer, and cookie-banner text still comes back as ordinary text. Deciding what's chrome versus article stays a caller-side step. We also don't ship schema-defined field extraction yet. See the capability table above for the full list.

the same job, one call

This is the whole integration: no install, no model download, no GPU.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.txtfetch.com/v1/extract?format=markdown" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TXTFETCH_KEY" \
  -F file=@document.pdf

frequently asked questions

Is MinerU still AGPL-licensed?: No, not since its 3.1.0 release. MinerU moved to a custom MinerU Open Source License built on Apache-2.0. It's free below 100 million monthly active users, or $20 million in monthly revenue, counting your affiliates. It also requires naming MinerU in any service you build on it.
Does MinerU need a GPU?: Only for its higher-accuracy backends. The pipeline backend runs on CPU. The VLM and hybrid-engine backends need a GPU, or Apple's mlx, for realistic throughput.
What makes MinerU's OCR different from the others here?: It bundles OCR recognition across 109 languages by default. That's the broadest language list of the five projects on this page, and it matters most for non-Latin and CJK-script documents.

sources

MinerU: LICENSE.md (custom, Apache-2.0-based)Accessed 2026-09
MinerU: README (changelog, formats, backends)Accessed 2026-09
mineru on PyPIAccessed 2026-09

other open-source parsers

Keep the library. Add the hard formats.

Some teams run both. Send only the files MinerU cannot read.

Read the quickstart →

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