Convertio vs Pandoc

Convertio is a browser-based file conversion service that handles more than 300 formats and more than 25,600 conversion types. It offers tools for audio, video, images, documents, archives, presentations, fonts, and ebooks, along with OCR for scanned documents and images. Conversions run in the cloud, and most conversion types offer advanced settings; video options can include quality, aspect ratio, codec, rotation, and flipping. OCR can create editable Word, PDF, Excel, and text outputs, with up to 10 pages available before signup. Files can be selected from Google Drive, Dropbox, a URL, or a computer. Convertio says input and temporary files are deleted immediately after conversion and output files after 24 hours, with earlier manual deletion available. It supports batch conversion and offers a Conversion API and Chrome extension. Platforms listed include web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and API. A free plan is available. Monthly plans range from $11.99 a month for Lite to $54 a month for Custom; annual-billing options range from 6.99 USD to $32.42 a month.

Pandoc is a command-line document converter and Haskell library, offered for free under the GPL. It converts among markup and word-processing formats including Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, Word DOCX, EPUB, and Jupyter notebooks. Readers parse a source into an abstract syntax tree, which writers then turn into the selected output format. Templates and Lua filters let users adjust processing, and Lua can also be used to create custom readers and writers. Pandoc formats citations and can produce bibliographies with hundreds of CSL styles. PDF output uses LaTeX by default, though users can specify another PDF engine. Installers or binaries are provided for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with package-manager and source installation also documented. It can be run through GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD, and official Docker images are available. The official Linux executable is statically linked without dynamic dependencies or external data-file dependencies. Pandoc has no graphical interface; conversions from more expressive formats can lose information, and complex tables may not fit its document model.