rsample
tidymodels' resampling package is retiring its old splitters for sliding windows.
Comparison · ai-assistants
Docling vs recipes
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Docling and recipes — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Docling vs recipes: at a glance
What is Docling?
Docling keeps widening the funnel: every release adds another format the parser can swallow.
Docling ships roughly weekly, and the shape of each release is consistent — one or two new input formats or model paths, then a dense list of parser corrections for DOCX, ODF, PDF and PPTX. The latest window adds Outlook .msg with optional attachment listing, an EBCDIC backend, VLM grounding output from Unlimited-OCR, and OpenAI logprobs exposed as generated tokens. Underneath, the OCR layer was restructured into a layout-driven pipeline with configurable modes and a RapidOCR refactor that resolves all PP-OCR languages by version and backbone.
What is recipes?
tidymodels' preprocessing engine learned sparsity, then settled into deprecations.
recipes is at 1.3.3, whose entire changelog is one suggested-package declaration. The substantive release in the window is 1.2.0, which taught recipe, prep and bake to work with sparse tibbles and sparse matrices, added a sparse argument to eight dummy and indicator steps, and made seventeen more steps preserve sparsity they receive. Since then the work has been deprecations and bug fixes.
Docling vs recipes: editorial side-by-side
Docling
6.3AI-ASSISTANTS
Docling keeps widening the funnel: every release adds another format the parser can swallow.
◆ Current state
Docling ships roughly weekly, and the shape of each release is consistent — one or two new input formats or model paths, then a dense list of parser corrections for DOCX, ODF, PDF and PPTX. The latest window adds Outlook .msg with optional attachment listing, an EBCDIC backend, VLM grounding output from Unlimited-OCR, and OpenAI logprobs exposed as generated tokens. Underneath, the OCR layer was restructured into a layout-driven pipeline with configurable modes and a RapidOCR refactor that resolves all PP-OCR languages by version and backbone.
◆ Where it's heading
Two things are being built at once. The conversion surface keeps broadening toward whatever a document actually arrives as — email, mainframe encodings, scanned pages, audio via Whisper — while the service datamodel grows the knobs a hosted pipeline needs: chunking options and targets, PDF heading-level inference, batch connector sources, configurable stage shutdown timeouts. The steady drip of DOCX and ODF reading-order fixes says fidelity, not throughput, is where the hard problems still are.
◆ Prediction
Expect the format list to keep extending and the VLM and OCR paths to gain more configurability, with reading-order and list-numbering corrections continuing at the same rate. The agent-skills addition suggests more packaging for agent callers, though the entries show only a first step.
recipes
0.0AI-ASSISTANTS
tidymodels' preprocessing engine learned sparsity, then settled into deprecations.
◆ Current state
recipes is at 1.3.3, whose entire changelog is one suggested-package declaration. The substantive release in the window is 1.2.0, which taught recipe, prep and bake to work with sparse tibbles and sparse matrices, added a sparse argument to eight dummy and indicator steps, and made seventeen more steps preserve sparsity they receive. Since then the work has been deprecations and bug fixes.
◆ Where it's heading
The direction is consolidation of a large step catalogue rather than growth. step_select and step_nnmf have entered deprecation, arguments across nine steps moved from strings and vars() calls to bare names, and all steps now require the same four arguments. The sparse work stands as the last structural change; what follows tidies the surface around it.
◆ Prediction
With step_select mid-deprecation and step_nnmf newly deprecated in favour of step_nnmf_sparse, the next release most likely advances those deprecations rather than adding steps.
Alternatives to Docling and recipes
Other ai-assistants products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Docling or recipes.
imbalanced-learn
The resampling companion to scikit-learn now ships mostly to stay compatible with it.
parsnip
parsnip added a whole new regression type, then wired R models to JAX and PyTorch
mlr3
mlr3 is hardening the seams where its abstractions meet real learners
Mem0
Mem0 splits agent memory from user memory, then spends a week hardening the plumbing
Pictory
Every post is a comparison page, and Pictory is always the answer.
See all Docling alternatives → · See all recipes alternatives →
Recent activity from Docling and recipes
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2d agoDoclingv2.119.0
- 5d agoDoclingv2.118.1
- 9d agoDoclingv2.118.0
- 13d agoDoclingv2.117.0
- 14d agoDoclingv2.116.0
- 20d agoDoclingv2.115.0
- 2mo agorecipesDeclares mixOmics as a suggested package
- 4mo agorecipesstep_nnmf() deprecated in favour of step_nnmf_sparse()
- 1y agorecipesFixes tune_args() with tuned parsnip arguments
- 1y agorecipesBare-name arguments across nine steps; step_select() deprecated
- 1y agorecipesFixes sparsity steps applied to derived variables
- 1y agorecipesSparse tibbles and sparse matrices supported end to end ⚡
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Docling and recipes?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Docling is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Docling better than recipes?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Docling is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other ai-assistants products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Docling?
Top Docling alternatives in ai-assistants are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Docling alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/docling for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to recipes?
Top recipes alternatives in ai-assistants are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "recipes alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/recipes for the full list with editorial commentary on each.