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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Smelt – Extract structured data from PDFs and HTML using LLM

I built a CLI tool in Go that extracts structured data (JSON, CSV, Parquet) from messy PDFs and HTML pages. The core idea: LLMs are great at understanding structure but wasteful for bulk data extraction. So smelt uses a two-pass architecture: 1. A fast Go capture layer parses the document and detects table-like regions 2. Those regions (not the whole document) get sent to Claude for schema inference — column names, types, nesting 3. The Go layer then does deterministic extraction using the inferred schema This means the LLM is never in the hot path of actual data processing. It figures out…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1
    l1m.io▲135

    The simplest API to get structured data from any LLM

    2025 · l1m.io · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    We've been building data pipelines that scrape websites and extract structured data for a while now. If you've done this, you know the drill: you write CSS selectors, the site changes its layout, everything breaks at 2am, and you spend your morning rewriting parsers. LLMs seemed like the obvious fix — just throw the HTML at GPT and ask for JSON. Except in practice, it's more painful than that: - Raw HTML is full of nav bars, footers, and tracking junk that eats your token budget. A typical product page is 80% noise. - LLMs return malformed JSON more often than you'd expect, especially with…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Turn any webpage into structured data using LLMs. Contribute to mishushakov/llm-scraper development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Extract web data into structured JSON, no scraper required.

    Jun 2026 · tabstack.ai · its alternatives →

  5. 5KG

    Hi HN! My latest side project is knowledge graph that maps the French culinary network using data extracted from restaurant reviews from LeFooding.com. The project uses LLMs to extract structured information from unstructured text. Some technical aspects you may be interested in: - Used structured generation to reliably parse unstructured text into a consistent schema - Tested multiple models (Mistral-7B-v0.3, Llama3.2-3B, gpt4o-mini) for information extraction - Created an interactive visualization using gephi-lite and Retina (WebGL) - Built (with Claude) a simple Flask web app to clean and…

    2025 · theophilecantelob.re · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    When building workflows that rely on LLMs, we commonly use structured output for programmatic use cases like converting an invoice into rows or meeting transcripts into tickets or even complex PDFs into database entries. The model may return the schema you want, but with hallucinated values like `invoice_date` being off by 2 months or the transcript array ordered wrongly. The JSON is valid, but the values are not. Structured output today is a big part of using LLMs, especially when building deterministic workflows. Current structured output benchmarks (e.g., JSONSchemaBench) only validate…

    Apr 2026 · interfaze.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Built a tool for transforming unstructured data into structured outputs using language models (with 100% adherence). If you're facing problems getting GPT to adhere to a schema (JSON, XML, etc.) or regex, need to bulk process some unstructured data, or generate synthetic data, check it out. We run our own tuned model (you can self-host if you want), so, we're able to have incredibly fine grained control over text generation. Repository: https://github.com/automorphic-ai/trex Playground: https://automorphic.ai/playground

    2023 · automorphic.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Effortless LLM extraction from documents

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Extract structured data from text, files and archives.

    Mar 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...

    2024 · embedding.io · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Improved file parsing for LLM’s. Contribute to Filimoa/open-parse development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Documind is an open-source tool that turns documents into structured data using AI. What it does: - Extracts specific data from PDFs based on your custom schema - Returns clean, structured JSON that's ready to use - Works with just a PDF link + your schema definition Just run npm install documind to get started.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13IU

    Hello! I used an LLM to extract structured data from each comment on the “Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (January 2024)” post, available at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38842977. This created a dataset of 400+ jobs with data such as title, company name, location, is job remote, salary data, and the URL/email to contact. For the UI, a NextJS static site was created to filter and view the structured data.

    2024 · hnjobsai.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi HackerNews, Lately, I have seen an explosion in posts offering paid APIs/services to get unstructured data into LLMs (i.e. langchain extract, ragflow, unstructured, unstract, just to name a few) and I have been largely disappointed by them, either because they fail to implement multimodal support, fail to give good context for "really tricky" PDFs / Word docs / Powerpoints, or are just plain difficult to use. In light of all these posts I figured I'd share my solution that has been working smoothly for me and my clients. I put it up on GitHub for free so you can check it…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15AL

    Hey HN! After struggling with complex prompt engineering and unreliable parsing, we built L1M, a simple API that lets you extract structured data from unstructured text and images. curl -X POST https://api.l1m.io/structured \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "X-Provider-Url: demo" \ -H "X-Provider-Key: demo" \ -H "X-Provider-Model: demo" \ -d '{ "input": "A particularly severe crisis in 1907 led Congress to enact the Federal Reserve Act in 1913", "schema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "items": { "type": "array", "items": { "type": "object", "properties": {…

    2025 · l1m.io · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hey HN, I’m the author. I built Misata because existing tools (Faker, Mimesis) are great for random rows but terrible for relational or temporal integrity. I needed to generate data for a dashboard where "Timesheets" must happen after "Project Start Date," and I wanted to define these rules via natural language. How it works: LLM Layer: Uses Groq/Llama-3.3 to parse a "story" into a JSON schema constraint config. Simulation Layer: Uses Vectorized NumPy (no loops) to generate data. It builds a DAG of tables to ensure parent rows exist before child rows (referential integrity).…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi folks. I've been doing some experiments on how LLMs could get more handy in the day to day of working with files (CSV, Parquet, etc). Earlier last year, I built https://datakit.page and evolved it over and over into an all in-browser experience with help of duckdb-wasm. Got loads of feedbacks and I think it turned into a good shape with being an adhoc local data studio, but I kept hearing two main things/issues: Why can't the AI also change cells in the file we give to it? Why can't we modify this grid ourselves? So besides the whole READ and text-to-SQL flows, what seemed…

    Feb 2026 · opensheet.app · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    While working with LLMs for structured web data extraction, we saw issues with invalid JSON and broken links in the output. This led me to build a library focused on robust extraction and enrichment: - Clean HTML conversion: transforms HTML into LLM-friendly markdown with an option to extract just the main content - LLM structured output: Uses Gemini 2.5 flash or GPT-4o mini to balance accuracy and cost. Can also also use custom prompt - JSON sanitization: If the LLM structured output fails or doesn't fully match your schema, a sanitization process attempts to recover and fix the data,…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Realtime web data for LLMs

    2023 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    All-in-one CLI/SDK for structured data extraction with LLMs

    Mar 2026 · struktur.sh · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    G'day, HN! I'm one of the maintainers of `llm`. I've been working alongside a trusty group of contributors to bring this project to life, and we're now at a point where we're ready to share it with the world. Large language models (LLMs) are taking the computing world by storm due to their emergent abilities that allow them to perform a wide variety of tasks, including translation, summarization, code generation, and even some degree of reasoning. However, the ecosystem around LLMs is still in its infancy, and it can be difficult to get started with these models. `llm` is a one-stop shop for…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Improved file parsing for LLM’s. Contribute to Filimoa/open-parse development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I built Sculptor after repeatedly seeing founders try to hire data scientists for a task that ultimately boiled down to extracting structured data from unstructured text (customer records, social posts, websites, etc) using an LLM API. We ended up reinventing this pattern internally at least three times in the past year, so I published Sculptor as a streamlined, open-source solution: - Simple schema-based extraction, with parallelization and type validation. - Multi-step pipelines with filtering or transforms between steps. - Configure everything in YAML/JSON for easy reuse. It’s MIT…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24AT

    I recently built a small open-source tool to benchmark different LLM API endpoints — including OpenAI, Claude, and self-hosted models (like llama.cpp). It runs a configurable number of test requests and reports two key metrics: • First-token latency (ms): How long it takes for the first token to appear • Output speed (tokens/sec): Overall output fluency Demo: https://llmapitest.com/ Code: https://github.com/qjr87/llm-api-test The goal is to provide a simple, visual, and reproducible way to evaluate performance across different LLM providers, including…

    2025 · llmapitest.com · its alternatives →

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