anydoc vs MarkItDown: Two Multi-Format Document-to-Markdown Converters Compared

For a while, Microsoft's MarkItDown was the default answer to "one library that converts everything to Markdown." In 2026 Firecrawl shipped a challenger: anydoc, a Rust library that converts Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, PDF, and more — 14 formats — to clean Markdown, with Node.js and Python bindings.

Both are MIT-licensed and free. Here is where they actually differ. (If you would rather skip the library decision entirely, file2markdown converts all of these formats in the browser or via API — try it free.)

The Quick Answer

Use anydoc when you want Rust-grade speed and predictable behavior in a Node.js or Python service, and your inputs are standard office documents.

Use MarkItDown when you need the longest tail of formats — including images, audio transcription, and HTML — or you are already deep in the Python/Azure ecosystem.

What Each Tool Is

anydoc (Firecrawl, MIT) is a Rust engine with bindings for Node.js (@firecrawl/anydoc) and Python (firecrawl-anydoc). It parses document containers natively and emits Markdown, enforcing strict safety limits (decompression size, nesting depth, node counts). Design philosophy: convert correctly or fail loudly — encrypted, image-only, or malformed files produce a clear error rather than silently degraded output.

MarkItDown (Microsoft, MIT) is a pure-Python library that wraps established extractors (python-docx, openpyxl, pdfminer, and others) behind one interface. It covers the broadest format range of any single tool — including audio files via transcription — and has a large community around it (88k+ GitHub stars).

Head-to-Head Comparison

	anydoc	MarkItDown
Language / speed	Rust core — fast	Python — slower on large files
Office formats (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX)	Yes	Yes
OpenDocument, RTF	Yes	Partial
EPUB, CSV, HTML	Yes (EPUB, CSV)	Yes
Images / audio	No	Yes (OCR/transcription hooks)
PDF quality	Text-based PDFs; image-only rejected	Flat text via pdfminer
Failure mode	Explicit errors, no partial output	Best-effort output
Bindings	Node.js, Python, Rust	Python
License	MIT	MIT

The Philosophical Difference

The interesting gap is not the format list — it is what happens on hard inputs. anydoc enforces resource limits and refuses files it cannot convert faithfully: password-protected documents, image-only PDFs, and structurally broken files return errors you can handle. MarkItDown leans best-effort: it will usually give you something, which is convenient in exploration and dangerous in production RAG pipelines, where silently mangled tables poison retrieval quality downstream.

If you have ever debugged why one document in ten thousand produced garbage chunks, anydoc's fail-loudly design is a feature, not a limitation.

Installing and Using Each

anydoc

npm install @firecrawl/anydoc    # or: pip install firecrawl-anydoc

import { toMarkdown } from '@firecrawl/anydoc';
const markdown = await toMarkdown('report.docx');

MarkItDown

pip install 'markitdown[all]'

from markitdown import MarkItDown
result = MarkItDown().convert("report.docx")
print(result.text_content)

Where Both Fall Short

Neither does OCR. anydoc rejects image-only PDFs outright; MarkItDown needs extra configuration and still underperforms on scans. For scanned documents you need a vision pipeline — see our scanned PDF guide. And for PDFs specifically, both are outclassed by dedicated engines: Firecrawl's own pdf-inspector produces better-structured Markdown from PDFs than either (full comparison).

Which Should You Use?

Production Node.js/Python service over office documents → anydoc: faster, stricter, predictable errors.
Widest possible format coverage in one Python dependency → MarkItDown — see how it fares against other tools in MarkItDown vs Unstructured and Docling vs MarkItDown.
PDF-heavy workloads → a dedicated PDF engine; start with pdf-inspector vs MarkItDown.
No code at all → file2markdown converts DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, PDF, images, and more — with automatic OCR where the libraries stop.

anydoc vs MarkItDown: Two Multi-Format Document-to-Markdown Converters Compared