An alternative to Docling is Xberg: https://github.com/xberg-io/xberg

"A polyglot document intelligence framework with a Rust core. Extract text, metadata, images, and structured information from PDFs, Office documents, images, and 97+ formats. Available for Rust, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, PHP, Elixir, C#, R, C, TypeScript (Node/Bun/Wasm/Deno)- or use via CLI, REST API, or MCP server."

Amongst other things, you can use it with Open Webui: https://docs.xberg.io/integrations/openwebui/#choosing-an-en...

fyi, they are releasing their v1.0.0 release shortly and until then you will need to a release candidate docker image tag: https://github.com/xberg-io/xberg/issues/1192

As a layman, I would say Xberg is better than Docling because its one engine for everything while the former feels like a bunch of scripts and glue logic.