Nanonets Alternative for PDF to Excel: OCR Tables Without an IDP Platform
Nanonets is an enterprise document AI platform: it reads documents, runs them through workflows, and pushes the results into systems like SAP and NetSuite. If what you actually need is the table out of a PDF and into Excel, that is a lot of platform to buy. PDFXLSX does the narrow job on a flat plan. Drop a file on the right and look at the output before you talk to anyone.
OCR on scanned pages is included on paid plans, and files are deleted after processing.
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The short answer
Nanonets is an intelligent document processing platform built for enterprises that need documents to trigger a business process: invoice approvals, order matching, reconciliation, and posting into an ERP. Its pricing page lists a free Starter tier with credits to begin, then usage priced per run, roughly $0.02 for simple operations, $0.10 for standard AI and $0.30 for complex AI, with a typical invoice workflow consuming four to six of those runs. Growth and Enterprise plans are quote based. PDFXLSX is the alternative for the much smaller job underneath all of that: upload a PDF, get a clean Excel or CSV file with the columns intact, on a flat plan starting at $9 a month with no metering and no implementation. If you need approval routing and ERP posting, Nanonets is the correct product and this page will say so more than once.
Last updated August 2026. Nanonets details taken from its own pricing and product pages, checked this month. Vendor pricing in this category changes often, so confirm current rates directly before you buy.
Flat
No per-run metering
Minutes
Not an implementation
OCR
Included on paid plans
$9/mo
Entry plan, published
These are two different categories of product
Most comparison pages pretend the two tools do the same thing at different prices. That is not what is going on here, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Nanonets sells intelligent document processing, usually shortened to IDP. The premise is that a document arriving in your inbox should set off a chain of events: the fields get read, the values get checked against a purchase order or a policy, anything uncertain goes to a human for approval, and the finished record lands in your accounting or ERP system without anyone retyping it.
That is a genuinely hard problem and Nanonets has built a lot of machinery for it: extraction models, human-in-the-loop review queues that route to Slack or Teams, connectors into systems of record, audit logs, role-based access, and the compliance posture that a regulated buyer has to have before anything gets signed. If your bottleneck is that fifty invoices a day need approving and posting, that machinery is the product you are shopping for.
PDFXLSX does one step of that chain. A PDF goes in, a spreadsheet comes out, with the columns where they should be and the numbers stored as numbers. There is no workflow engine, no approval routing, no ERP connector. That narrowness is the entire point: it means you can extract data from a PDF to a spreadsheet this afternoon without a project plan, and it means the price is a published number rather than a conversation.
| Invoice | Vendor | Net | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| INV-40219 | Halstead Supply Co | 3,120.00 | 3,370.00 |
| INV-40220 | Corbin Freight | 845.50 | 913.14 |
| INV-40221 | Westline Packaging | -210.00 | -226.80 |
| INV-40222 | Ridgeway Tool Rental | 1,475.00 | 1,592.50 |
Four columns stay four columns, the credit note stays a negative number rather than text, and the totals column sums on the first try. That is the whole deliverable here. What you do with the sheet afterwards is your workflow, not ours.
Nanonets vs PDFXLSX
An honest comparison, including the several rows where Nanonets is plainly the stronger product. One is a document automation platform, the other is a table converter.
| Capability | Nanonets | PDFXLSX |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Document AI platform for automating document-driven processes end to end | A converter that turns PDF tables into Excel or CSV |
| Workflow automation and approvals | Yes. Approval gates with human review routed to Slack, Teams or email | None. You get a file and take it from there |
| Posting into an ERP or accounting system | Yes. Connectors for systems including SAP, QuickBooks, Xero and Salesforce | No connectors. Export the file and import it yourself |
| Learning from corrections | Yes. Models improve from operator feedback on your own documents | No training loop. Structure is detected per file |
| Enterprise compliance | Publishes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR and HIPAA-ready posture, SSO and SCIM, private deployment | Encrypted transfer and deletion after processing, but no SOC 2 report, SSO or on-premise option |
| How you are billed | Per run, roughly $0.02 simple, $0.10 standard AI, $0.30 complex AI, then quote based at Growth and Enterprise | Flat monthly plan from $9, published, no metering |
| Time to first useful output | Account setup, workflow configuration, and usually a conversation for anything past the free tier | Upload a file on this page and look at the result |
| OCR on scanned pages | Yes, a core strength, with its own OCR model and confidence scoring | Yes, included on paid plans and applied automatically |
| Best fit | Enterprises automating high volume AP, order processing or claims, where documents must post into a system of record with an audit trail | Finance teams, accountants and analysts who need clean spreadsheets out of PDFs without buying a platform |
Read that table honestly and Nanonets wins four rows outright: workflow automation, ERP posting, learning from your corrections, and enterprise compliance. Those are not small rows. If your finance director needs an audit trail and a SOC 2 report before anything gets approved, or if the goal is that nobody touches an invoice between the inbox and the ledger, buy the platform. This page is only arguing that a large number of people shopping in this category do not need any of that, and are about to overpay for it.
What Nanonets costs, and why it is hard to compare
Nanonets moved to a credits and usage model, which is more honest for a platform than a flat per-page fee but much harder to estimate before you start. You are not billed per document. You are billed per block that runs, and one document usually runs several. The figures below are from the Nanonets pricing page as it stood in August 2026.
| Nanonets plan | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free credits to begin, then listed at $100 a month for 100 credits | Data extraction, API access, email import, cloud storage connectors, up to 3 users, community support |
| Growth | Quote based, with volume discounts stated up to 40% | Adds classification, barcode and signature detection, generative AI and custom Python blocks, ERP integrations, analytics |
| Enterprise | Custom, tailored to volume | Everything in Growth plus SAML SSO, HIPAA compliance, private cloud or on-premise deployment, dedicated support, whitelabel UI |
| Usage rates | $0.02 simple, $0.10 standard AI, $0.30 complex AI, per run | Nanonets notes a typical invoice workflow runs four to six blocks per document |
Do the arithmetic on the usage rates and a complex invoice workflow lands somewhere near a dollar or two per document, which for automated AP is defensible: it is cheaper than the minutes a person would spend. But if your actual task is converting thirty statement PDFs at month end so you can reconcile them in Excel, per-run pricing is the wrong shape entirely. You are paying for an inference pipeline to do something a converter does on a flat plan. One caveat worth stating plainly: published figures for the free tier differ between the Nanonets pricing page and third-party summaries, so treat every number here as a starting point and confirm it with the vendor. Our own pricing page lists plans from $9 a month, and our PDF to Excel converter pricing breakdown compares what several vendors in this category charge.
What you get when the tool stops at the spreadsheet
Fewer capabilities, and a much shorter distance between having a PDF and having something you can work with.
Nothing to configure first
A platform has to be told what your documents mean before it is useful: which fields matter, what to validate them against, who approves what. A converter does not ask, because it is only reproducing a table that already exists on the page. That difference is most of the setup time.
The bill does not move
Per-run billing means a heavy month costs more than a light one, which is fine until you are trying to get a number approved for next year. A flat plan is easier to budget and easier to defend, and it does not punish you for reprocessing a file you got wrong the first time.
OCR without a confidence dashboard
Scanned pages are images, so the characters have to be read before a table can be found. That runs automatically here whenever a page turns out to be a scan, which is covered in more depth on our OCR PDF to Excel page and in the guide to converting a scanned PDF to Excel.
Numbers arrive as numbers
The most common failure in any PDF conversion is an amount column that will not sum because the values landed as text with a stray currency symbol. We treat that as part of the conversion, and if you still hit it, converting text to numbers in Excel covers the fix.
Whole documents, not just fields
IDP tools are tuned to pull named fields: invoice number, vendor, total. That is right for AP, and wrong when you want every row of a 200 line report. If your document is mostly table, a PDF table extractor keeps the rows you would otherwise have to reconstruct.
Batches without a pipeline
Month end usually means a folder of files rather than one. Uploading them together and getting one workbook back is enough for most teams, and it is what our batch PDF to Excel converter is for. No queue to monitor and no per-document meter running.
How to get a PDF into Excel without setting up a platform
Four steps, and none of them involve a workflow builder.
Upload the PDF
Drag the file onto the box at the top of this page. Native PDFs and scans are both accepted, and you do not have to say which is which.
The table gets rebuilt
Column edges, row boundaries and repeated headers are detected. If the page is an image, OCR runs first so there is text to work with.
Check the preview
Look at the grid before committing to anything. Column count and the first few rows tell you quickly whether the result is usable.
Download XLSX or CSV
Take the workbook into Excel, Sheets or your accounting system, then check the conversion for errors before relying on the totals.
Who actually switches
The people who move off an IDP platform, or who evaluate one and decide against it, usually discover that they bought the wrong shape of tool. A controller signs up because invoices are painful, then realizes the painful part was never the extraction. It was that six people email spreadsheets around. The platform reads the invoice beautifully and the process is still six people emailing spreadsheets.
The second pattern is volume that never arrived. Per-run pricing and a quote based Growth tier assume a pipeline running constantly. A firm converting a few hundred documents at month end is not that, and the platform sits idle for three weeks out of four while someone still has to maintain it. Our page for accountants and the one for bookkeepers describe that rhythm in more detail.
The third is simply that the documents are reports rather than forms. A rent roll, a trial balance, a brokerage statement: these are tables, not field sets, and a tool tuned to find the invoice total has nothing useful to say about row 147. If your work looks like that, and especially if it looks like converting bank statements to Excel, a converter is the closer fit. Larger operations should still look at PDF to Excel for enterprise before deciding.
When Nanonets is the better choice
- Documents must post into a system of record. If the outcome you want is a bill created in your ERP with an audit trail, no converter reaches that. Buy the platform.
- You need approvals and exception handling. Routing low-confidence documents to a human, tracking who approved what, and holding exceptions in a queue are platform features by definition.
- Compliance is a gate. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA readiness, SSO and private deployment are table stakes for regulated buyers, and we do not offer them.
- The documents are forms, at volume, forever. Thousands of invoices a month in a stable format is exactly where a model that learns from corrections earns its price.
Nanonets alternative: common questions
What is Nanonets used for?
Nanonets is an intelligent document processing platform used to automate document-heavy business processes. Typical uses are accounts payable invoice processing, purchase order and shipment matching, and claims or loan document handling. It reads the document, applies business rules, routes anything uncertain to a person, and pushes the finished data into systems like SAP, QuickBooks or Xero.
How much does Nanonets cost?
As of August 2026, Nanonets prices by usage rather than per page. Its pricing page lists a free Starter tier with credits to begin and a listed rate of $100 a month for 100 credits, with runs charged at about $0.02 for simple operations, $0.10 for standard AI and $0.30 for complex AI. Growth and Enterprise plans are quote based, with volume discounts stated up to 40%.
Does Nanonets have a free plan?
Nanonets offers a free Starter tier that includes credits to begin, along with data extraction, API access and up to three users. Published figures for how many credits you get differ between the vendor's own pricing page and third-party summaries, so check the current offer directly. The free tier is meant for evaluation rather than sustained production volume.
Can Nanonets convert PDF to Excel?
Yes. Nanonets extracts data from PDFs and can export to Excel and CSV, and it preserves tables and line items. The difference is scope rather than capability: it is built to feed that data into a workflow and a system of record, so you are configuring and paying for a pipeline even when all you wanted was the spreadsheet at the end of it.
What is the difference between IDP and a PDF converter?
Intelligent document processing reads meaning from a document: it identifies which value is the invoice total, checks it against a rule, and triggers the next step in a process. A PDF converter reproduces structure: it works out where the columns and rows sit and writes them into a spreadsheet. IDP is for automating a workflow, a converter is for getting data you can work with.
Is Nanonets good for bank statements?
It can handle them, but bank statements are a table problem more than a field problem. What you usually want is every transaction row with dates, descriptions and amounts intact, not a handful of named fields. A converter tuned for tables is generally the shorter route, and it avoids paying per run for hundreds of rows that need no interpretation at all.
What are the best Nanonets alternatives?
It depends which half of the job you need. For workflow automation and ERP posting, the comparable platforms are other IDP vendors such as Rossum, Docsumo or Mindee. For getting tables out of documents into spreadsheets, the comparison set is converters: see our Docparser alternative, PDFTables alternative and ABBYY FineReader alternative pages.
Do I need an API to automate PDF to Excel conversion?
Only if the conversion has to happen without a person present. If someone is already opening the file at month end, a browser upload with batch support removes the same work an API would, without the engineering. Automation earns its cost when documents arrive continuously and nobody should be watching for them, which is precisely the case a platform is built for.
More PDF to Excel options
Docparser alternative
Another rules-and-parsing tool, compared on setup time and price.
PDFTables alternative
The credit-based API converter, and when per-page billing adds up.
ABBYY FineReader alternative
The OCR heavyweight, and when its licensing outweighs its accuracy.
Data entry automation
Where converting documents fits against automating the process around them.
Purchase order PDF to Excel
Line items and quantities, kept as rows you can total.
How to extract tables from PDF
The methods available, from copy and paste to automated extraction.
See the output before you evaluate a platform
Upload one of the documents you were about to run through an IDP trial and look at the spreadsheet that comes back. If it is all you needed, you just saved yourself an implementation.
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