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.
Dolphinfree
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
| Dolphin | headroom | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 9.1k | 74.3k |
| Star velocity /mo | 28.253968253968253 | 1.5k |
| Commits (90d) | 0 | 1.2k |
| Releases (6m) | 0 | 10 |
| Overall score | 0.23349701227865008 | 0.8896326908220638 |
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.