Tablewise vs MarkItDown for Excel and financial tables

Short answer

Use MarkItDown for plain documents — PDFs without tables, Word text, HTML, EPUB, emails. It is free, mature and has an official MCP server. Use Tablewise when the document carries numbers in a table that a model has to read correctly: monthly packs, budgets, P&L, invoices, ledgers. Or when you need to prove where a figure came from.

Tablewise uses MarkItDown for the formats where it is good. The difference is what happens with spreadsheets and with provenance.

Where they differ

	MarkItDown	Tablewise
Merged cells / multi-level headers	Flattened into `Unnamed`	Rebuilt as a real table
Formula without a cached value	Empty cell	`(formula not calculated)`
Percentage formatting	`0.8769`	`87.69%`
Hidden sheets	Silently dropped	Kept and labelled
Provenance header	No	`source`, `engine`, `converted`
Desktop app for non-technical users	No	Yes
Hosted API with monthly plans	No	Yes
Deterministic, no AI, no network	Yes	Yes (CLI and desktop)
PDF table reconstruction (Docling)	Basic	Yes, via Docling

Benchmark, same file, same machine

Five synthetic workbooks generated by bench/run_benchmark.py. Numbers are defects (lower is better) or wins (higher is better):

Case	Unnamed cols	NaN cells	Formatted %	Formulas marked
`financial_pack`	0 / 11	0 / 41	3 / 0	3 / 0
`invoices_dates`	0 / 0	0 / 0	4 / 0	0 / 0
`formula_model`	0 / 0	0 / 6	0 / 0	6 / 0
`hidden_sheet`	0 / 0	0 / 0	0 / 0	0 / 0
`ledger_negatives`	0 / 0	0 / 0	0 / 0	0 / 0

Format: Tablewise / MarkItDown. Full page with the raw outputs: benchmark.

When MarkItDown is the better choice

You only convert prose: reports, articles, policies, emails.
You need 40+ input formats and a mature ecosystem today.
You want an official MCP server and a GitHub Action.
You do not need a provenance header or a desktop app.

When Tablewise pays for itself

A wrong number in a board pack costs more than a year of the API.
You need to cite the source file in every answer (audit, compliance).
Non-technical people must convert documents without a terminal.
You want deterministic output: same file in, same Markdown out.

Try it on your own worst spreadsheet

Free key, 50 units a month, no card. Or run the CLI locally and send nothing anywhere.

Get a free key Read the docs