What should I use to extract data from PDFs automatically?

It depends on the kind of PDFs you have and how accurate you need the extraction to be. Here are the main options:

1. Text-based PDFs

If the PDF contains selectable text, use a PDF text extraction library:

• Python: pdfplumber, PyMuPDF (fitz), pypdf
• Java: Apache PDFBox
• Node.js: pdf-parse

Best for: invoices, reports, contracts with real text.

2. Scanned PDFs / images

If the PDF is just images, you need OCR:

• Tesseract OCR (open source)
• Google Document AI / Vision OCR
• AWS Textract
• Azure Document Intelligence

Best for: scanned forms, photographed documents, low-quality PDFs.

3. Structured documents like forms or tables

If you need tables, key-value pairs, or document layout:

• AWS Textract
• Azure Document Intelligence
• Google Document AI
• Camelot / Tabula for tables in text-based PDFs

Best for: invoices, receipts, bank statements, forms.

4. End-to-end pipeline

A common automated workflow is:

1. Detect whether PDF has extractable text
2. If yes, use pdfplumber / PyMuPDF
3. If no, run OCR
4. Post-process with regex/LLM/rules to structure the data

Recommended choices

• Simple text extraction: pdfplumber or PyMuPDF
• Tables from clean PDFs: Camelot or Tabula
• Scanned documents: Tesseract or cloud OCR
• Enterprise-grade accuracy: AWS Textract, Google Document AI, or Azure Document Intelligence

If you want, I can recommend the best tool for your exact use case if you tell me:

• whether the PDFs are scanned or text-based
• what data you need extracted
• your preferred language/runtime (Python, JavaScript, etc.)