Alternatives to Poppler
PDF rendering library with pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo tools. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Poppler
PDF rendering library with pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo tools.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Poppler.
MuPDF
Compact, very fast PDF and XPS viewer with a command-line toolkit.
MuPDF provides a fast rendering library and viewer under AGPL-3.0 with its mutool toolkit, but commercial use of the library needs a paid Artifex licence.
mutool (MuPDF)
Command-line companion to MuPDF for PDF extraction, cleaning and merging.
mutool is MuPDF's command-line tool for extraction, cleaning and merging, replacing Poppler's utilities with a single cross-platform CLI.
Ghostscript
PostScript and PDF interpreter behind a great deal of other software.
Ghostscript is an AGPL-3.0 interpreter for PostScript, PDF, PCL and XPS used for rendering and conversion, with commercial redistribution requiring a paid Artifex licence.
Xpdf
A PDF viewer plus command-line tools for extracting text and images and converting PDFs to HTML.
Xpdf offers a lightweight viewer plus command-line text, image and HTML extraction tools, though not every component is open source.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
qpdf
Command-line tool for content-preserving PDF transformations.
pdfcpu
Go library and command line for validating and transforming PDFs.
Evince
GNOME's lightweight document viewer for PDF, PostScript and other document formats on Linux.
Okular
Universal document viewer for PDF, EPUB, comics, DjVu and more.
Tesseract OCR
The open-source OCR engine behind most free text recognition tools.
pdf2htmlEX
A command-line converter that turns PDF files into HTML while keeping text and layout.
