Data engineers building ETL pipelines that feed unstructured documents into vector databases and LLMs.

Unstructured is an open-source ETL library, with an optional enterprise platform, that partitions PDFs, images, and 60+ file types into structured elements for chunking and embedding.

Self-hosted as a Python library or REST API; the enterprise Platform product is hosted SaaS.

Widely adopted since 2022, with the enterprise Platform product actively expanded through 2026.

It exists to standardize messy, varied document formats into clean structured data for downstream AI workflows.

Integrates with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and vector databases as a preprocessing step.

Open source core (Apache-2.0), with a paid hosted Platform; self-hosted library needs no API key, hosted Platform requires an API key and sends documents to Unstructured's cloud.