Adobe PDF Services / PDF Extract API vs LandingAI Agentic Document Extraction

Adobe PDF Services / PDF Extract API

Public OpenAPI 3.0.1 spec covering Extract, PDF to Markdown and 20 other operations. No published paid price, paid use goes through sales.

LandingAI Agentic Document Extraction

Parse, Extract and Ground have a public OpenAPI description, Markdown docs, published credit rates and page limits, and a status page showing no incident in 90 days. The Explore plan's single API key cannot be revoked without support, and the published terms let LandingAI train on customer documents unless Zero Data Retention, a Team and Enterprise setting, is on.

Adobe PDF Services / PDF Extract API

1. Cache the access token and reuse it until it expires
2. Budget 1 Document Transaction per 5 pages for Extract and PDF to Markdown, so 500 free transactions cover about 2,500 pages
3. Pass notifiers with a callback URL instead of polling the job status
4. Use pdf-services-ew1.adobe.io when documents must stay in the EU
5. Check /operation/pdfproperties first, since copy-protected PDFs fail Extract with DISQUALIFIED_PERMISSIONS

LandingAI Agentic Document Extraction

1. Send Authorization: Bearer <key> to https://api.ade.landing.ai/v2/parse. EU keys work only on https://api.ade.eu-west-1.landing.ai
2. Submit large files to /v2/parse/jobs. Synchronous parse times out at 475 seconds and is capped at the plan's pages-per-minute limit
3. Leave jobs on the standard tier unless speed matters. It consumes half the credits of priority
4. Run Extract on the Markdown that Parse returned, then call Ground for page numbers and boxes. Ground consumes no credits
5. On a 429, read the message. One case clears with backoff and the other means the document is too large for the tier