I’ve had my fair share of frustration trying to pull data from PDFs—whether it’s scraping tables, grabbing text, or extracting specific fields from invoices. So, I tested six AI-powered tools to see which ones actually work best. Here’s what I found:

1. Tabula – Best for tables. If your PDF has structured data, Tabula can extract it cleanly into CSV. The only catch? It struggles with scanned PDFs.

2. PDF.ai – Basically ChatGPT for PDFs. You upload a document and can ask it questions about the content, which is a lifesaver for contracts, research papers, or long reports.

3. Parseur – If you need to extract the same type of data from PDFs repeatedly (like invoices or receipts), Parseur automates the whole process and sends the data to Google Sheets or a database.

4. Blackbox AI – Great at technical documentations and better at extracting from scanned documents, API guides, and research papers. It cleans up extracted data extremely well too making copying and reformatting code snippets ways easier.

5. Adobe Acrobat AI Features – Solid OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for scanned documents. Not the most advanced AI, but it’s reliable for pulling text from images or scanned contracts.

6. Docparser – Best for business workflows. It extracts structured data and integrates well with automation tools like Zapier, which is useful if you’re processing bulk PDFs regularly.

Honestly, I was surprised by how much AI has improved PDF extraction. Anyone else using AI for this? What’s your go-to tool?