Dolphin vs headroom

Side-by-side comparison of two AI agent tools

Short answer

  • Dolphin has had no commit in 6 months; headroom is actively maintained (1,208 commits in the last 90 days).
  • headroom is growing faster: +1,515 GitHub stars in the last 30 days vs +28 for Dolphin.
  • Pick Dolphin for: the official repo for “Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting”, ACL, 2025. Pick headroom for: compresses tool outputs, logs, RAG chunks, files, and conversation history before they reach LLMs.

From GitHub data refreshed daily.

The official repo for “Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting”, ACL, 2025.

h
headroomopen-source

Compresses tool outputs, logs, RAG chunks, files, and conversation history before they reach LLMs

Metrics

Dolphinheadroom
Stars9.1k74.3k
Star velocity /mo28.2539682539682531.5k
Commits (90d)01.2k
Releases (6m)010
Overall score0.233497012278650080.8896326908220638

Pros

  • +Universal document parsing capability that handles both digital and photographed documents seamlessly
  • +Advanced two-stage architecture with document-type-aware parsing strategies optimized for different document formats
  • +Comprehensive 21-element detection including complex elements like formulas, code blocks, and tables with attribute field extraction

    Cons

    • -Research-focused tool that may require significant technical expertise to implement and integrate
    • -Relatively new release with limited production use cases and community feedback
    • -Large model size (3B parameters) may require substantial computational resources for deployment

      Use Cases

      • •Academic research document digitization and content extraction from PDFs and scanned papers
      • •Enterprise document processing for complex reports, invoices, and forms with mixed content types
      • •Automated parsing of technical documentation containing code snippets, mathematical formulas, and diagrams

        FAQ

        Which is more popular, Dolphin or headroom?
        headroom has more GitHub stars (74,277 vs 9,058).
        Which is more actively developed, Dolphin or headroom?
        headroom had more commits in the last 90 days (1,208 vs 0).
        Should I use Dolphin or headroom?
        Compare their capabilities, limitations and "best for" notes above. Trying each on a small task is the fastest way to decide.