--- title: A Faster Open-Source Alternative to MarkItDown, Pandoc,... description: The Firecrawl team released anydoc, an open-source, cross-platform document converter built with Rust that converts Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/a-faster-open-source-alternative-to-markitdown-pandoc-and-docling-nfkcqp6kr twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: A Faster Open-Source Alternative to MarkItDown, Pandoc, and Docling | daily.dev og:description: The Firecrawl team released anydoc, an open-source, cross-platform document converter built with Rust that converts Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/a-faster-open-source-alternative-to-markitdown-pandoc-and-docling-nfkcqp6kr og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/NFkCqP6kr.png og:image:alt: A Faster Open-Source Alternative to MarkItDown, Pandoc, and Docling og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # A Faster Open-Source Alternative to MarkItDown, Pandoc, and Docling **[bytefer](https://daily.dev/sources/fx5kjjichwjnx5totxmtp)** · [@bytefer](https://daily.dev/bytefer) · 3 min read · 60 upvotes · 2 comments ## Summary The Firecrawl team released anydoc, an open-source, cross-platform document converter built with Rust that converts Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF files into clean Markdown. It offers Node.js and Python bindings, a CLI, browser support via WebAssembly, and built-in agent skills for platforms like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. Benchmarked against six mainstream converters across 100 real-world documents in 14 formats, anydoc claims superior performance. It detects document formats from binary data, supports local processing without OCR, and provides a unified document model for consistent Markdown output. ## Content In recent years, with the rapid advancement of LLM capabilities, AI has become deeply integrated into office scenarios. These scenarios often involve handling a wide variety of document formats - such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF - which are not inherently LLM-friendly. Consequently, the standard approach is to convert them into Markdown, making a high-quality document converter essential. Recently, the Firecrawl team released **anydoc**, a powerful, open-source, cross-platform document converter. It enables the rapid conversion of formats like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF into clean Markdown documents.  ### Anydoc Features - Built-in Agent Skills for rapid integration into various agent platforms - Fast processing speed, cross-platform, built with Rust, and provides Node.js and Python bindings. - Supports non-scanned PDF documents and runs locally, eliminating the need for OCR services. - Identifies document formats based on binary data, ensuring accurate conversion even if file extensions are incorrect. - Supports conversion across multiple document formats; features a unified document model and Markdown serializer to ensure consistent rendering. Currently anydoc supports the following document types: - Word : .doc, .docx, .docm - PowerPoint : .ppt, .pps, .pot, .pptx, .pptm, .ppsx, .ppsm - Excel :  .xls, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb - OpenDocument : .odt, .ods, .odp - Rich Text Format :  .rtf - EPUB :  .epub - CSV : .csv - PDF :  .pdf ### Anydoc Performance Anydoc was compared against six mainstream converters, with testing covering 100 real-world documents across **14** formats; scores ranged from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating better performance.  ### Anydoc Online Demo Open [https://batchtool.com/tools/docs-to-markdown](https://batchtool.com/tools/docs-to-markdown) in your browser, then drag the document you wish to process into the "Drop documents, or click to choose" area to convert it.  ### Local Deployment **CLI** ``` npx @firecrawl/anydoc report.docx # Markdown to stdout npx @firecrawl/anydoc slides.pptx -o slides.md # or to a file npx @firecrawl/anydoc - --format csv < data.csv # read stdin ``` **Node.js** 1.Install **firecrawl/anydoc** module ``` npm install @firecrawl/anydoc # Or pnpm add @firecrawl/anydoc ``` 2.Using the **@firecrawl/anydoc** module ``` import { toDocument, toMarkdown, toMarkdownBytes } from '@firecrawl/anydoc'; // From a file path: const markdown = await toMarkdown('report.docx'); // From bytes, with the format detected from the content: const fromBytes = await toMarkdownBytes(bytes); // Or stop at the document model, which also carries embedded assets. // Unsupported for `pdf` const document = await toDocument(bytes); ``` In real-world document scenarios, you should use `try…catch` statements to catch errors during conversion. For example, when converting a PDF file that contains only images, an exception with the error code "unsupported" will be thrown.  anydoc error codeIf you want to use anydoc in the browser, you need to use the `@firecrawl/anydoc-wasm` module. **Agent Skill** If you want to use anydoc with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or OpenCode, you first need to install the built-in anydoc Agent skill: ``` npx skills add firecrawl/anydoc ``` ### Summary With the anydoc library, we can easily implement document conversion functionality across various environments or platforms. If you only need to handle PDF documents, you can use the pdf-inspector library developed by the Firecrawl team; however, it does not support image-based PDFs, so you would still need to integrate an OCR service yourself. ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@agustinbarrientos** · 0 upvotes > I don't think native documents, misleading file extensions, and image-only PDFs belong on one speed leaderboard. **@cjbaccus** · 0 upvotes > Cool. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [4 practical pandoc techniques for everyday document conversion](https://daily.dev/posts/4-practical-pandoc-techniques-for-everyday-document-conversion-wogzwon7g) · All Things Open · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [I write everything in Markdown and let a free converter produce Word documents instead](https://daily.dev/posts/i-write-everything-in-markdown-and-let-a-free-converter-produce-word-documents-instead-jdt7jqh90) · XDA Developers · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust), [#markdown](https://daily.dev/tags/markdown) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/a-faster-open-source-alternative-to-markitdown-pandoc-and-docling-nfkcqp6kr) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https://daily.dev/posts/a-faster-open-source-alternative-to-markitdown-pandoc-and-docling-nfkcqp6kr","headline":"A Faster Open-Source Alternative to MarkItDown, Pandoc, and Docling","text":"The Firecrawl team released anydoc, an open-source, cross-platform document converter built with Rust that converts Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF files into clean Markdown. 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