Turn documents into structure-aware data for
RAG, search and AI agents
Overview
Your data is trapped in documents
Docling for IBM watsonx is a fully managed document intelligence service that transforms unstructured documents into structure-aware data for RAG, Search, and AI agents. By preserving table layouts, hierarchies, document structures, and relationships, it helps AI systems deliver more accurate and reliable results. As your systems scale, Docling for IBM watsonx manages the underlying infrastructure—so your teams can focus on building and improving AI solutions.
Built on IBM’s open-source Docling toolkit—with more than 70 million downloads, and 63k GitHub stars—Docling for IBM watsonx provides a streamlined path from experimentation to production through a managed service, an intuitive interface, and APIs for automated document processing.
Built to process more, for less
Features
Everything you need to prepare documents for AI, RAG, and enterprise search
Turn raw documents into structured formats like Markdown, JSON and HTML that are easier for search, RAG and agent workflows to use. With cleaner, more consistent inputs, teams can improve retrieval quality and get more accurate, reliable results from downstream AI systems.
Basic extraction can strip away the structure that makes a document understandable. Docling for IBM watsonx uses optimized AI models to preserve essential document context—including layout, hierarchy, tables, and reading order—so the document’s original structure and meaning remain intact.
Process PDFs, images, slide decks, forms, spreadsheets, audio files and more in a single platform. Instead of stitching together multiple approaches, teams can work with many types of formats in a more consistent way, reducing tool sprawl and simplifying how content moves into AI workflows.
Start quickly in the UI to upload documents, test conversion settings and inspect results. When you’re ready to scale, use the API to embed and automate document processing across applications, data pipelines and AI workflows.
As AI solutions, RAG systems and Search experiences scale, the document-processing infrastructure behind them becomes more complex to operate and troubleshoot. Docling for IBM watsonx manages this infrastructure for you, so your teams can focus on building and improving AI experiences.
Docling for IBM watsonx uses improved table, layout, and OCR processing models, built on Docling OSS and enhanced for accuracy and reliability. Your teams get better extraction quality without having to evaluate, tune, or manage models themselves.
Use cases
Put your enterprise knowledge to work
Integrations
Connect to content wherever it lives
Access and convert documents directly from the repositories where they live. Docling for IBM watsonx includes pre-built connectors for popular cloud storage, enterprise content management, and vector databases.
Pricing
Explore pricing
Docling for IBM watsonx pricing is based on Resource Units, or RUs, to make usage simple across different document types.
1 RU equals 1,000 pages or objects (for files like PDFs, images, or slides) or 50 million characters (for files like plain text or spreadsheets).
Resources
Getting started
Explore blogs, documentation and technical resources to learn how Docling for IBM watsonx works and start building.
FAQs
Docling for IBM watsonx is a fully managed document intelligence service that transforms unstructured documents into structure-aware data for retrieval-augmented generation, search, agents, and other AI workflows.
The open-source Docling toolkit gives developers flexibility, but teams are responsible for deploying, scaling, securing, and maintaining it. Docling for IBM watsonx provides a managed experience with APIs and a user interface designed to help teams move more quickly toward production use.
Yes, Docling can support OCR-based processing for scanned documents and images, while also applying document understanding capabilities to preserve more structure than basic text extraction alone.
OCR primarily turns images or scanned pages into text. Docling can use OCR for scanned PDFs and images, but it goes beyond text recognition by performing document understanding: page layout analysis, reading order, table structure recognition, code/formula handling, image classification, and conversion into a unified document representation.
Docling includes document parsing, but it goes beyond basic parsing. Instead of only extracting text, Docling converts documents into a unified representation that can preserve elements such as tables, pictures, hierarchy, layout, headers and footers, etc.
Docling recognizes tables as structured document elements rather than flattening them into plain text. It can preserve row, column, and cell relationships, apply table-structure recognition for PDFs, and export detected tables into formats such as Markdown or HTML.
Frontier models can work well for processing a small number of documents. However, organizations often need to prepare thousands—or even millions—of documents for RAG, search, AI agents and automation. At that scale, repeatedly sending raw documents to frontier models can become costly, inefficient and difficult to operationalize. A dedicated document intelligence service provides a more scalable and consistent way to transform large document collections into structured, AI-ready data.
Docling for IBM watsonx can convert documents into Markdown, Text, HTML, JSON, DocLang, and DCLX. You can configure the output format based on the requirements of your search, RAG, AI agent or automation workflow.
Docling supports the following input formats:
- PDF documents - Including scanned PDFs with OCR
- Images - PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF
- Microsoft Office - DOCX, PPTX, XLSX
- HTML - Web pages and HTML documents
- Markdown - MD files
- Text files - TXT, CSV
*Docling is a trademark of LF Projects, LLC. For more information about Docling, see docling.ai.
*Based on a comparison of U.S. published pay‑as‑you‑go list prices as of June 9, 2026 per 1,000 pages for document processing workloads that go beyond basic OCR and return structured outputs such as layout, tables, or forms, compared to selected offerings from several major vendors. Excludes free tiers, OCR‑only services, commitment or volume discounts, negotiated enterprise pricing, and region or currency differences. Dollar savings calculated by comparing Docling for IBM watsonx list price of USD 4 per 1,000 pages to the lowest‑priced qualifying comparable offerings. Actual savings may vary.