Skip to content
cask.news
← Home

Tabula

tabula · v1.2.1

6
7.5

Tool for liberating data tables trapped inside PDF files

Developer Tools Homepage →
brew install --cask tabula
Compare with: vs. OpenRefine vs. Microsoft Excel vs. Tad vs. ParaView
19
30-day installs
56
90-day installs
675
365-day installs
Install trend
Trust Score 6/10
✓ Open source (MIT) +3
✗ Active development +0
✓ Licensed +1
✗ No auto-updates +0
✓ Not deprecated +1
✓ Established (>1yr) +1
✗ Low installs +0

Review

Mar 10, 2026

Tabula is a powerful tool for extracting data tables from PDF files, offering a user-friendly interface and open-source flexibility. It benefits data analysts and researchers by simplifying the process of liberating trapped data.

Tabula extracts and liberates data tables from PDF files.

Maturity: The project has strong community interest with over 7k stars, but it has 541 open issues and the last commit was in 2025.

Community: Tabula has been mentioned on Hacker News in several relevant discussions, indicating sustained interest but no recent activity. No mentions on Reddit.

Pros

  • + Open-source with MIT license
  • + User-friendly interface for data extraction
  • + Cross-platform support

Cons

  • - No auto-update feature
  • - High number of open issues and last commit over a year ago

GitHub

View repo →
7.4k
Stars
684
Forks
541
Issues
MIT
License
CSSLast commit: Mar 14, 2025

Community Mentions

hackernews
Mar 2023 Miller: Like Awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON
hackernews
Aug 2022 Why do tree-based models still outperform deep learning on tabular data?
hackernews
Aug 2019 TSV Utilities: Command line tools for large, tabular data files
hackernews
Oct 2018 A Python Library to extract tabular data from PDFs
hackernews
May 2017 Tad, a tabular data viewer
Positive sentiment Negative sentiment Neutral / unknown

Similar apps

View all alternatives →

OpenRefine

openrefine

8.0

Tool for working with messy data (previously Google Refine)

Developer Tools 65 installs/mo
vs.

Microsoft Excel

microsoft-excel

9.0

Spreadsheet software

Productivity 1.8K installs/mo
vs.

Tad

tad

6.5

Desktop application for viewing and analyzing tabular data

Productivity 93 installs/mo
vs.

ParaView

paraview

8.0

Data analysis and visualization application

Developer Tools 474 installs/mo
vs.

Table Tool

table-tool

6.0

CSV file editor

Productivity 21 installs/mo
vs.

Open Data Editor

open-data-editor

6.0

No-code application to explore, validate and publish data in a simple way

Developer Tools 3 installs/mo
vs.