Adobe PDF Extract API
Cloud API that extracts text, tables and structure from PDFs into JSON or Markdown.
Opens the vendor's own site.
Jobs covered
Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.
Extract
Browse all extract toolsextracting text in contextual blocks, complex tables and figures from native or scanned PDFs as structured JSON or Markdown through the cloud-based PDF Extract API, called via the PDFServices SDK for Node.js, Python, .NET and Java, with optional CSV, XLSX and PNG outputs and a free tier of 500 document transactions per month
OCR
Browse all ocr toolsextracting text from scanned PDFs through the cloud PDF Extract API, whose own documentation discusses OCR and scan quality as dependent on input clarity such as skewed pages, shadowing, obscured or overlapping fonts and resolution below 200 DPI
Convert
Browse all convert toolsrenditions only: structured JSON or Markdown output, with tables optionally as CSV or XLSX and images as PNG; not general PDF conversion
Where your files are processed
Reported to upload your files
The vendor states that files are uploaded to their servers. We have not independently tested this.
Documents are uploaded to Adobe Document Cloud, which Adobe states runs on AWS infrastructure in the United States and EMEA regions, and processed there. No on-premises deployment is documented.
What it does
A cloud service bundled with the Adobe PDF Services API that parses a PDF and returns its content with structural metadata. It emits structured JSON - headings, paragraphs, lists, tables and figures, with reading order, bounding boxes and font details - or LLM-friendly Markdown, and can deliver table and figure renditions as CSV, XLSX and PNG.
It handles native PDFs and, through Adobe's models, scanned ones. Billing is per document transaction, with extraction metered at one per five pages.
Best for
Server-side teams that need machine-readable structure - reading order, table cells, coordinates - out of a large PDF backlog, and that are comfortable sending documents to a cloud API.
Worth knowing
The limits are nominal rather than guaranteed: 100 MB per file, 400 pages for a non-scanned PDF and 150 for a scanned one, 25 requests a minute, and OCR optimised for English. Complex or table-heavy files can hit lower limits than those, the vendor says so, and not every annotation becomes extracted content.
It rejects XFA and fillable forms, password-protected files and copy-restricted documents. Metering is one transaction per five pages, so the 500 free transactions a month are roughly 2,500 pages.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- API
- Website
- developer.adobe.com
- Requires an account
- Yes
- Free tier
- Yes
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- 100 MB
- Batch processing
- Not verified
- Data residency
- Multiple regions
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- No
- Licence
- Not verified
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- HTTP API
- Last availability check
- Responded in 6 ms 21 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
What that does not establish
The vendor’s own site was read on 22 September 2026 and contains no mention of redaction, sanitisation, blackout or whiteout. Absence from a vendor’s own material is not proof that a feature does not exist - it may be undocumented, or on a page the reading did not reach - but for a NEGATIVE claim it is the strongest evidence available, and it is weaker than a positive quote.
Recorded as such rather than presented as certainty.
https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/overview/pdf-extract-api/
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
-
“Files up to a maximum of 100MB are supported.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence is the first line under a heading reading "API limitations". The rest of that block is the useful part and the claim omits it entirely: non-scanned PDFs are limited to 400 pages, scanned PDFs to 150 pages or fewer, and "limits may be lower for files with multiple tables".
So a reader who checked the 100MB figure and sized their batch accordingly could still be refused on page count, and a document of 200 pages is inside the file-size limit and outside the page limit. Recorded as the vendor's documentation; no API call was made.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- a955e81f37648c11c423eb9a4e5a51f3df86010599d41ab26490bec91e4419dd
How we checked
Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/overview/pdf-extract-api/howtos/extract-api re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-developer-adobe-com-document-services-docs-overview-pdf-ex-aa38273b.txt.
-
“All documents either uploaded as assets or generated as output by the API are stored in Adobe Document Cloud for 24 hours by default.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 21 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence appears unaltered in the section on transient storage, and a second form of it appears further down for the .NET, Node.js and Python SDKs, where documents "remain available on the servers for 24 hours". Four facts from the same page make the claim more useful than it looks.
The 24 hours is a default ceiling rather than a floor, because the page documents three ways to store less: assets are reachable only by the credential that created them or by a signed URL the API returns, there is no API to list available assets, and the REST API can delete an asset immediately through the Assets endpoint's DELETE verb. Customers can also avoid Adobe's storage altogether, since the REST API supports signed URLs against the customer's own storage, which the page calls bringing your own storage.
For the Power Automate connector, Adobe states that uploaded assets are deleted automatically once processed. So a reader should take the claim as the default expiring window, not as a commitment that documents sit there for a day.
Recorded as the vendor's own documentation; we have not called the API and no control was run.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- ffd3f457f69ae4efb5e67de038fb8d0f8b938afab15e54163ce2e1f19c3a0efd
How we checked
The recorded source is a description rather than a URL; it resolves to the Acrobat Services security page at https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/overview/security, which was rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs on 2026-09-21 (visible text 16641 bytes) and the claim checked against that text. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the rendered text.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.
Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.