Extend is the preferred choice for developer-first AI startups and enterprises that are working with complex documents, need benchmark-leading accuracy, control over cost, accuracy, and latency tuning, and zero training and data retention availability. Reducto is a better fit for lower stakes document workloads where variations in accuracy and latency is tolerated, for instance in pure ingestion and RAG use cases.
This comparison is grounded in empirical, open-source benchmarks that can be independently reproduced. Each metric specified includes citations to its source dataset, methodology, and last evaluation date.
Reducto began as a parsing only product focused on solving RAG use cases, then expanded to a broader coverage of the document processing workflow. Extend made an upfront commitment to training its high-accuracy, specialized VLM models for parsing and serving end-to-end document automation workflows, for top companies like Brex, Factset, CH Robinson, Flatiron, Zillow and more.
This difference shows up in the benchmark results below. Extend wins accuracy comparisons, provides higher control over cost, performance, and latency, and delivers higher uptime. For the most relevant evaluation, AI teams should test both solutions on their own documents.
To see an in-depth analysis, refer to our resource here.
Extend vs Reducto benchmarks at a glance
| Extend | Reducto | |
|---|---|---|
| Parsing accuracy | #1 on RealDoc-Bench. Extend Parse 2.0 achieved 95.7% document Q&A accuracy and 0.847 layout adjusted F1. RealDoc-Bench can be independently reproduced | On RealDoc-Bench, Reducto was 4.6 points behind Extend even with Agentic mode enabled. Reducto Agentic achieved 91.1% Q&A accuracy and 0.759 layout adjusted F1. Reducto standard mode scored 88.5%. Reducto’s RD-TableBench evaluates only isolated tables, and Reducto states that only a subset of its evaluation framework is public. In contrast, RealDoc-Bench publishes its datasets, parser adapters, and evaluation harness. |
| Extraction accuracy | Highest accuracy and 2.8× faster than Reducto. Extend MAX achieved 99.2% mean accuracy, completed 45/45 documents, and averaged 301 seconds on LongArray-Extract. | On LongArray-Extract, Reducto performed at lower accuracy and 2.8x the latency. Reducto Deep Extract achieved 97.4%, completed 45/45, and averaged 846 seconds. Reducto Standard scored 80.9%. Reducto’s extraction accuracy lead on LongExtractBench comes from a benchmark it commissioned and designed with micro1. micro1 discloses that Reducto “Reducto created the methodology for drafting ground truth and for running and grading the models”. Reducto attempts to present this as a third party benchmark, but it is highly biased. Datalab, another document AI startup ranked in the benchmark, has also publicly reported the bias in the benchmark. |
| Splitting accuracy | On PoliTax Split, Extend's harness catches about two thirds or more of boundaries for every underlying model and moves F1 toward 72%, adding 8.3 to 28.4 points over direct model use. | Reducto’s Split API has never been externally validated against benchmarks. |
Extend vs Reducto platform comparison
| Extend | Reducto | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform overview | Developer-first document processing platform. Extend turns unstructured documents into reliable, agent-ready data with APIs and tooling for parse, extract, split, classify, edit, workflows, evals, and review. | General-purpose document processing platform. Reducto offers document processing APIs that trail Extend on measured parsing, extraction, and splitting performance with restrictive ZDR policies. |
| Accuracy, latency & cost control | Control every point on the Pareto curve. Performance, light, and agentic configurations for document primitives let teams move flexibly across the full accuracy, latency, and cost frontier. Usage transparency available via Studio and API responses, including per-run credit totals and charge-level breakdowns. . | Tradeoffs are spread across modes, settings, and variable billing. Standard, Agentic, and Deep Extract modes require teams to navigate endpoint-specific controls. Page complexity automatically changes parse credits, Agentic doubles usage, and Deep Extract uses complexity-based pricing that is often prohibitively expensive for large document use cases. |
| Edit, workflows, evals, citations | End-to-end document workflow orchestration. Extend fills PDF forms with the Edit API (document editing with form-field detection), supports versioned workflows, evals, and returns source citations with page references and bounding boxes. | Incomplete platform support for end-to-end document workflow orchestration. Edit and pipelines supported. Evals is only available for custom-priced annual plans (Growth+). No native product support for complex mutli-step document orchestration. |
| Human review | Built-in human-in-the-loop review. A configurable human review step pauses a workflow and places the run in a review queue where operators inspect and correct output against the source document before downstream steps continue. Review Agent flags likely errors so reviewers focus on the fields that need attention. | No first-party review queue. Reducto exposes confidence and citations; review tooling is built by the customer. |
| RAG and parsing output | Markdown and chunks for retrieval. Parse returns layout-aware markdown organized into chunks with configurable chunking strategies, plus block-level reading order and bounding boxes. Figures, charts, and diagrams are summarized, charts can be converted to tables, and formulas return LaTeX. | Markdown and chunks for retrieval. Reducto also returns markdown and chunks. On RealDoc-Bench its output trailed Extend Parse 2.0 by 4.6 points with Agentic mode enabled. |
| Security & compliance | ZDR can be enabled for every customer including Pay-as-You-Go and monthly plans. Supports SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA with BAAs, GDPR, and EU processing. AI and GPU subprocessors operate under contractual ZDR and no-training terms. | ZDR and no-training commitments require a custom-quoted Growth or Enterprise plan and a corresponding Platform Fee. Reducto supports SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA, but its public BAA, ZDR, no-training, and regional-processing terms begin on custom-priced Growth tier. |
| Deployment & residency | Cloud, BYOC/VPC, and Hybrid. Extend documents three deployment models: managed Cloud in US or EU regions (EU hosting in Frankfurt), BYOC deployed into your own cloud account and VPC under your IAM and encryption policies with Extend managing deployment automation, and Hybrid, which keeps documents in your cloud while Extend runs inference. Extend does not currently offer a fully air-gapped deployment. | Cloud and full-VPC. Reducto documents hosted cloud and Full-VPC or air-gapped Enterprise deployment. |
| Enterprise readiness | Enterprise deployment with managed setup. Enterprise includes SSO/SAML, RBAC, custom MSA/DPA/SLA, custom limits, and dedicated support. | Full-VPC deployment shifts more infrastructure ownership to the customer. Customers own the runtime security boundary and operate Kubernetes and PostgreSQL. Custom SLAs, throughput, RBAC, SSO/SAML, and on-call support require Enterprise. |
| Pricing | Free self-serve PAYG; no contract, monthly minimum, or sales call required. Extend includes 10,000 free credits, then charges $0.0125/credit with no monthly platform fee. Scale is an optional volume tier at $500/month with 50,000 credits and $0.01 per additional credit. Per-operation rates are public: Light Parse is 0.5 credits/page ($0.00625) and Performance Parse is 2 credits/page ($0.025) on PAYG. | Self-serve PAYG on Standard with $150 in free usage; Growth and Enterprise are quote-only. Since September 2026 Reducto bills per product rather than per credit. List rates: r-1 Parse $0.01/page (preview), Extract $0.02/page and Deep Extract $0.04/page including parsing, with a possible per-field surcharge above 100 fields per page. Standard and Agentic Parse is $0.015–$0.03/page by complexity with a 2× multiplier for agentic modes. Volume discounts, ZDR, and a BAA require Growth. |
| Developer & agent experience | Four typed SDKs plus first-class coding-agent artifacts. Extend supports Python, TypeScript, Java, Go, REST, a CLI, MCP, alongside an agent quickstart, CLI agent skill, agent context file, open-source UI kit, open-source templates, llms.txt, and Markdown-native docs. | No published Java SDK, with more Go integration ceremony. Reducto provides Python, Node.js, Go, CLI, MCP, and an agent guide. |
Extend vs Reducto: which is right for you?
| Best fit use cases for Extend | Best fit use cases for Reducto |
|---|---|
| Measured accuracy on open-source benchmarks is the deciding factor. Extend led Reducto on RealDoc-Bench and LongArray-Extract, delivering SOTA parsing performance and better extraction accuracy that is nearly 3x faster. | Your workload is lower stakes and the measured accuracy gap is acceptable. Reducto is a great fit for RAG use cases where accuracy is not critical. |
| Your documents are complex and mistakes are expensive. Extend leads Reducto on parsing, extraction, and splitting on open-source benchmarks that use real-world documents rather than simple PDFs. Thus, they evidence Extend’s performance against production workloads. Moreover, Extend is broadly trusted by startups and enterprises across critical industries like healthcare, financial services, logistics, and real estate. | You require air-gapped, on prem deployment. Reducto supports fully isolated Enterprise deployments when data and processing cannot leave your environment. Customers operate the runtime infrastructure, including Kubernetes and PostgreSQL. |
| You need to control accuracy, latency, and cost. Extend lets you select the right operating point for each workload, from low latency, cost-efficient, to maximum accuracy. | |
| You want one platform from zero to deployment. Extend supports building, testing, evaluating, deploying, and operating document primitives natively to help you go live faster. Evals validate performance before launch; human review resolves exceptions in production with precise citations. | |
| You need strong no-training and ZDR protections. Extend maintains a no training policy. ZDR is available on every plan upon request (including pay as you go and monthly plans), while Extend’s AI and GPU subprocessors operate under contractual zero retention and no-training terms. | |
| You want transparent self-serve pricing at every tier. Extend starts free with self-serve PAYG and no contract or sales call, and its cost-optimized Light mode is priced below Reducto’s list rates for parsing and extraction. Scale pricing is published and upgradeable self-serve, while Reducto’s Growth pricing requires contacting sales. | |
| You need EU hosting or customer-controlled data residency without operating the runtime yourself. Extend Cloud offers a managed EU region, and BYOC keeps data inside your own VPC with Extend handling deployment automation. Reducto’s Full-VPC option requires the customer to operate Kubernetes and PostgreSQL. | |
| You prefer a developer-first platform built by developers for developers and their agents. Extend provides typed SDKs, APIs, a CLI, MCP, open source UI and templates, agent skills, and machine-readable documentation so you can build effectively. |
What to test before choosing
At the end of the day, all providers will make claims around accuracy, and it is critical that customers focus on evaluating their unique use cases and documents before making a decision one way or the other. For the most accurate evaluation, run both systems on the documents most commonly seen in your business.
- Select 25 to 100 representative documents, including the difficult edge cases like poor scans, long tables, checklist heavy documents, signatures, and multi-column layouts.
- Define the exact target schema and ground-truth values before testing either vendor.
- Score field completeness and correctness. Count timeouts and failed runs as failures.
- Run each platform in the mode required to hit your accuracy target, then compute the real per-page cost in that mode, including automatic parsing on Extend and any per-field surcharge on Reducto.
- Measure latency and human-in-the-loop review volume at the same accuracy threshold.
- Make one schema or document-template change and measure the engineering work required to ship it safely.
- Inspect the source trace for every wrong answer. Determine whether the failure came from OCR, layout, schema mapping, or review routing.
The winning system is the one that produces the required business object at the required accuracy with the lowest total operating cost.
Frequently asked questions
Is Extend more accurate?
Yes, on open source head-to-head benchmarks using real-world documents as the corpus. Extend Parse 2.0 achieved SOTA 95.7% Q&A accuracy versus 91.1% for Reducto Agentic and 88.5% for Reducto Standard. Extend MAX also reached 99.2% long-array extraction accuracy versus 97.4% for Reducto Deep Extract (and 80.9% for Reducto Standard) while running 2.8× faster.
Is it easy to migrate from Reducto to Extend?
Yes. Extend is designed to make migration straightforward for developers and their agents. Teams can typically reuse document inputs, JSON schemas, and downstream data models. Typed SDKs, REST APIs, a CLI, MCP, agent skills, and machine-readable documentation accelerate implementation. Ready-made industry-specific templates and the Extend UI Kit reduce integration work and you can readily access Extend support.
Is Reducto or Extend cheaper?
It depends on the processing mode you need. Comparing Extend’s published credit rates with Reducto’s September 2026 list rates on Pay As You Go, per page:
- Parse: Extend Light $0.00625, Reducto r-1 $0.01 (preview), Extend Performance $0.025.
- Extract, including parsing: Extend Light $0.015 (0.7 Extract + 0.5 automatic Parse credits), Reducto Extract $0.02, Reducto Deep Extract $0.04, Extend Performance $0.0625 (3 + 2 credits).
Extend’s Light mode is cheaper than Reducto for both parsing and extraction. Extend lets you choose the mode per processor, so you pay for maximum accuracy only where a workload needs it, and Scale lowers every rate by 20%. Reducto’s Growth and Enterprise rates are not published. The published parsing benchmarks we cite were measured on Reducto’s Standard and Agentic modes before r-1 entered preview, so test both systems in the configuration you would actually run and compare cost at the accuracy you require.
Does Extend require a monthly minimum or a sales call?
No. Extend’s Pay As You Go plan is free to start with 10,000 credits and has no contract, monthly platform fee, or sales conversation. Scale ($500/month) is an optional volume tier with a lower per-credit rate, and Enterprise is for custom deployment and agreements. Claims that Extend has a $300 or $500 monthly minimum or is sales-only are out of date.
Does Extend have a document editing API?
Yes. The Edit API detects PDF form fields and fills them from a schema or natural-language instructions. Edit is currently PDF-focused.
Is Extend cloud-only?
No. Extend documents Cloud, BYOC, and Hybrid deployment. Cloud runs in Extend-managed US or EU regions. BYOC deploys Extend into your own cloud account and VPC under your IAM and encryption policies. Hybrid keeps documents and application data in your cloud while inference runs in Extend’s cloud. Extend does not currently document a fully air-gapped deployment; Reducto does.
Does Extend support human review?
Yes. Workflows include a configurable Human Review step that pauses the run and places it in a review queue in the dashboard, where operators inspect and correct output against the source document before downstream steps continue.
