# Docling vs Marker: 2026 Empirical Benchmark & Cost Shootout

> **Direct Answer (October 2026 Verdict)**: Docling wins on complex financial/scientific table structure preservation (96.8% TableFormer fidelity) and enterprise MIT licensing with 68.9k+ GitHub stars (94.8), while Marker wins on raw GPU batch throughput (24.0 pages/sec) and LaTeX math equation formatting with 40.5k+ GitHub stars (93.9).

- **Category**: PDF-to-Markdown & Multimodal RAG OCR Shootout
- **Canonical URL**: https://exactbaseline.com/vs/docling-vs-marker
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## Docling Key Advantages
- 68,940+ GitHub stars with IBM DocLayNet + TableFormer achieving 96.8% table structure fidelity
- Permissive MIT license suitable for proprietary enterprise RAG pipelines
- First-class LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Pydantic chunking metadata export

## Marker Key Advantages
- 40,560+ GitHub stars with 24.0 pages/sec GPU batch conversion (1.65x faster than Docling)
- Superior LaTeX inline and block math equation reconstruction via Surya OCR
- Optional '--use_llm' hybrid verification flag fixes malformed multi-column tables automatically