Milldown vs pandoc

An honest comparison — because if pandoc is what you need, you should use pandoc. It's one of the great open-source tools. The short version: pandoc is a universal converter that goes every direction; Milldown does one direction — into Markdown — with a native Mac app around it.

	Milldown	pandoc
Direction	Anything → Markdown	Nearly anything → nearly anything
Interface	Native Mac app + menu bar + Finder + optional CLI	CLI (GUIs exist as third-party wrappers)
Scanned PDFs	Automatic on-device OCR (Apple Vision)	No OCR — scanned PDFs yield nothing
PDFs generally	Yes, text layer + OCR fallback	Not as input (pandoc writes PDFs, doesn't read them)
Web pages / YouTube	Paste a URL; transcript support	HTML files yes; fetching and YouTube, no
Token analytics	Per-file token counts and savings, priced per model	—
AI-workflow tooling	RAG chunking (MD/JSONL), context packs, front matter, clean-up pass	Templates and filters (Lua) — different aims
Automation	Watch folders, URL scheme, CLI	Scripts, Makefiles — excellent
Privacy	100% local	100% local
Price	$39 one-time, 3 Macs (14-day free trial)	Free, open source (GPL)

When you should use pandoc

• You need Markdown → PDF/LaTeX/docx/HTML — the direction Milldown deliberately doesn't do.
• Academic writing: citations, BibTeX, LaTeX templates — pandoc is unmatched.
• You want infinitely scriptable conversion with filters, and the terminal is home.

When Milldown fits better

• Your inputs include PDFs and scans — pandoc can't read PDFs at all, and nothing OCRs in that pipeline.
• You want drag-and-drop, Finder integration, watch folders — a tool that's ambient rather than invoked.
• Your destination is an AI tool or RAG pipeline — token counting, chunk export, and clean-up are built for exactly that.
• You'd rather not maintain a Haskell toolchain install for a daily task.

Or use both

Plenty of people will: Milldown to get everything into Markdown (especially PDFs and scans), pandoc to take Markdown out to print-quality PDF or LaTeX. The formats are compatible — that's rather the point of Markdown.