PDF Library Benchmarks

July 2, 2025 · View on GitHub

This benchmark is about reading pure PDF files - notscanned documents and not documents that applied OCR.

Benchmarking machine

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz

Input Documents

#	Name	File Size	Pages
1	2201.00214	2.4MiB	22
2	GeoTopo-book	5.1MiB	117
3	2201.00151	1.5MiB	12
4	1707.09725	7.0MiB	134
5	2201.00021	2.6MiB	10
6	2201.00037	2.9MiB	33
7	2201.00069	14.7MiB	15
8	2201.00178	2.3MiB	16
9	2201.00201	1.3MiB	9
10	1602.06541	2.9MiB	16
11	2201.00200	284.8KiB	7
12	2201.00022	1.2MiB	14
13	2201.00029	797.6KiB	12
14	1601.03642	1004.9KiB	8

Libraries

Name	Last PyPI Release	License	Version	Dependencies
pypdfium2	2024-12-19	Apache-2.0 or BSD-3-Clause	4.30.1	PDFium (Foxit/Google)
pdfminer.six	2025-05-06	MIT/X	20250506
pdfplumber	2025-06-12	MIT	0.11.7	pdfminer.six
pdfrw	2017-09-18	MIT	0.4
pdftotext	-	GPL	0.86.1	build-essential libpoppler-cpp-dev pkg-config python3-dev
PyMuPDF	2025-06-12	GNU AFFERO GPL 3.0 / Commerical	1.26.1	MuPDF
pypdf	2025-06-29	BSD 3-Clause	5.7.0
Tika	2025-03-26	Apache v2	3.1.0	Apache Tika

Text Extraction Speed

#	Library	Average	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
1	PyMuPDF	0.1s	0.4s	0.3s	0.2s	0.2s	0.0s	0.1s	0.0s	0.1s	0.0s	0.1s	0.0s	0.1s	0.0s	0.0s
2	pypdfium2	0.1s	0.5s	0.3s	0.2s	0.2s	0.0s	0.1s	0.0s	0.0s	0.0s	0.1s	0.0s	0.0s	0.0s	0.0s
3	Tika	0.2s	0.8s	0.5s	0.3s	0.3s	0.1s	0.2s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.0s	0.0s
4	pdftotext	0.3s	0.7s	0.9s	0.2s	0.8s	0.1s	0.3s	0.4s	0.1s	0.1s	0.2s	0.1s	0.1s	0.0s	0.0s
5	pypdf	3.5s	26.2s	6.4s	6.8s	3.3s	0.9s	1.6s	0.6s	0.6s	0.5s	0.8s	0.6s	0.6s	0.5s	0.3s
6	pdfminer.six	5.8s	35.1s	16.6s	10.2s	5.5s	1.5s	2.5s	1.1s	1.6s	1.1s	2.0s	1.5s	1.4s	0.7s	0.6s
7	pdfplumber	9.5s	60.9s	16.6s	17.0s	10.7s	3.1s	5.3s	2.6s	2.5s	2.3s	3.8s	2.5s	2.7s	1.4s	1.3s

Image Extraction Speed

#	Library	Average	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
1	PyMuPDF	0.5s	0.3s	0.5s	0.0s	1.6s	0.4s	0.0s	2.9s	0.4s	0.4s	0.1s	0.0s	0.3s	0.2s	0.0s
2	pypdfium2	1.1s	1.2s	1.8s	0.0s	3.3s	0.9s	0.2s	5.1s	0.7s	0.6s	0.4s	0.0s	0.5s	0.2s	0.0s
3	pypdf	4.2s	21.6s	6.1s	5.7s	11.8s	1.3s	0.6s	6.5s	1.2s	1.2s	0.8s	0.2s	0.9s	0.2s	0.2s
4	pdfminer.six	7.4s	43.9s	17.5s	12.7s	15.4s	1.6s	2.5s	1.6s	1.5s	1.0s	1.8s	1.2s	1.3s	0.7s	0.5s

Watermarking Speed

#	Library	Average	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
1	pdfrw	0.1s	0.1s	0.5s	0.0s	0.3s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.0s	0.1s	0.0s	0.0s
2	PyMuPDF	0.2s	0.4s	0.6s	0.2s	0.4s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.1s	0.0s	0.1s	0.0s	0.0s
3	pypdf	0.5s	0.6s	2.0s	0.4s	1.1s	0.2s	0.3s	0.3s	0.3s	0.2s	0.3s	0.1s	0.6s	0.1s	0.1s

Watermarking File Size

#	Library	Average	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
1	pypdf	3.4MB	2.5MB	5.6MB	1.6MB	7.2MB	2.7MB	3.1MB	15.4MB	2.4MB	1.3MB	3.0MB	0.3MB	1.2MB	0.8MB	1.0MB
2	pdfrw	3.5MB	2.5MB	5.7MB	1.6MB	7.3MB	2.7MB	3.1MB	15.4MB	2.4MB	1.3MB	3.0MB	0.3MB	1.2MB	0.8MB	1.0MB
3	PyMuPDF	3.7MB	2.7MB	6.9MB	1.7MB	8.5MB	2.8MB	3.4MB	15.5MB	2.5MB	1.4MB	3.2MB	0.3MB	1.3MB	0.9MB	1.1MB

Text Extraction Quality

#	Library	Average	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
1	pypdfium2	97%	99%	97%	94%	99%	98%	96%	99%	99%	99%	99%	98%	78%	99%	99%
2	pypdf	96%	99%	95%	93%	98%	99%	96%	97%	99%	99%	99%	99%	78%	100%	99%
3	PyMuPDF	96%	98%	96%	93%	97%	98%	95%	99%	98%	98%	98%	97%	77%	98%	99%
4	Tika	95%	99%	98%	92%	97%	98%	96%	93%	97%	98%	93%	98%	73%	98%	96%
5	pdftotext	91%	96%	93%	91%	94%	92%	96%	96%	96%	97%	83%	94%	77%	96%	79%
6	pdfminer.six	89%	95%	79%	86%	92%	86%	93%	95%	93%	92%	92%	93%	71%	98%	86%
7	pdfplumber	75%	94%	84%	68%	97%	61%	93%	61%	89%	57%	59%	67%	58%	98%	67%