LandingAI Agentic Document Extraction vs Unstructured API + MCP

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.

Unstructured API + MCP

Apache-2.0 library partitions 45+ file types locally at no cost, tagged 11 times since 3 July. No status page, no published rate limits and no SLA.

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

Unstructured API + MCP

1. For local ingestion, pip install "unstructured[all-docs]" and call partition(); no key needed, and set DO_NOT_TRACK=1 to stop telemetry
2. Transform returns 202 with a Location header for long parses; poll it, then pass the parse id as parse_id to Extract
3. Uploaded files expire after 24 hours; keep the original and re-upload on a 404
4. Treat 409 parse_expired and 410 result_expired as a signal to rerun the parse, not to retry
5. Check for an existing job ID before resubmitting, since there's no idempotency key