Top Data Extraction APIs for Developers in 2025

In this article we will explore how ApyHub can help you take away the complexity of extracting data from different types of documents (including images).

Maria Hayat

Last updated on April 17, 2025

Every major industry today leverages data to gain meaningful industry insights, and promote data-driven decision making. At the same time, applications of data science are increasing every day.

Most web applications store, process and produce data that is often stored in structured formats, to be used for either record keeping or to gain additional insights into the usage of the application. Even a simple static website is embedded with different third-party tools, integrations and plug-ins that are used to monitor traffic to the website, and provide insights into their users.

A lot of data is still captured in files though - be it office documents, pdf files, images, videos and so on. This information was traditionally made to be consumed by other business users, but as applications start collecting and storing these documents and images at scale, the need to be able to search through this data and make these documents and images searchable becomes paramount.

However processing these different documents requires the use of different libraries and resources such as memory and compute that bloat your applications and often tend to be overlooked.

In this article we will explore how ApyHub can help you take away the complexity of extracting data from different types of documents (including images).

So, what is Data Extraction?

It is the process of extracting relevant information (from a user’ perspective) in a comprehensive manner.

While it might sound easy and straightforward, different file types come with their own unique styles of capturing and structuring information. This is why extracting just the right information can become a challenge.

Using Utility services for data extraction

Utility services that specialize in data extraction can make this process extremely smooth. These services use the best available tools and libraries to extract data from the documents or images. Moreover, integration of these services within your applications is extremely straightforward, as typically you just need to provide the files and receive the extracted data as a response.

Using utility services also reduces the overall load on your applications since the heavy lifting is outsourced to the provider and your applications can remain lean and clean without heavy dependencies o additional processing needed.

Best ApyHub Data Extraction APIs for 2025

With ApyHub, you can create a token for your clients (by creating an application in your workspace settings) and this token can be used to access the entire catalog of ApyHub’s APIs.

Need to fetch the metadata from an image? Or maybe you want to extract text from a document or webpage? Looking for something specific in a pile of (incoherent) text? Here are the best Data Extraction Utility APIs that can use in 2025:

Extract Metadata from an Image Image metadata contains the entire DNA of an image. The metadata contains useful information that can be generated by the device capturing the image or important attributes such as any filters used, or information about intellectual property. Image metadata can be used to catalog and conceptualize visual information using attributes of the image. Use this tokenized API to generate metadata in text format, by uploading your image or providing an accessible URL.

Extract content from a pdf While pdfs provide flexibility in sharing your documents and require no licensed software to view, making any modifications to the content contained within a pdf or simply extracting it, is not easy. By pointing this API to your pdf documents or an accessible link to your pdf, you can extract the content in your pdfs as a text string.

Extract text from webpage Get the content of your webpages using this easy-to-use API. You can then modify or transform it into any format using Apyhub’s Text Converter utilities. This API requires only the url of your webpage to extract the content and provides a response as a text string.

Extract text from word document This API comes in handy when you want to pull out the content from word documents. All you need to do is simply upload your word file or an accessible link to your word document and call this API, the content within the word document will be returned as a text string that can be used anywhere, modified, processed or reformatted.

Miscellaneous keyword search in unstructured text ApyHub’s fuzzy search lets you search through large unstructured and often incoherent text data. All you need to do is search for your keywords, the API can return relevant results that could be misspelled or even spelled with accented letters. You can then use this API to search for a term likely to be relevant to a search argument, even if that content does not match the search query exactly. Fuzzy search uses a fuzzy matching program that checks the relevance of your keywords in the target data.

Find a host of other useful utility APIs, that provide easy to use endpoints for various small tasks including fetching country details, validating email addresses and domains, and converting files.

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

FAQ

1. What file formats can be processed with the File to Text API?

The File to Text API supports a variety of formats, including PDFs, DOCX, PPTX, TXT, and HTML. If you need to extract content from a specific file format not listed, check out our expanding catalog of APIs for additional solutions.

2. How do I handle images and extract text from scanned documents?

For images or scanned documents, the OCR API is your best bet. It’s optimized to recognize text from both printed and handwritten sources. Simply upload an image in JPG, PNG, or TIFF format for OCR processing.

3. Can I use the APIs to extract data from websites or online resources?

Yes, ApyHub offers a Web Scraping API that can extract text, images, links, and other data from websites. You can easily specify the data you need and automate the process to pull information from various pages.

4. How accurate is the OCR API when extracting text from handwritten documents?

Our OCR API is optimized for printed text, but it performs reasonably well with clear handwriting. For critical use cases, we recommend preprocessing images or testing with a few samples to check accuracy.

5. Can I extract structured data like tables from documents or PDFs?

While the File to Text API focuses on plain text, it does retain basic formatting that can help with parsing tables. For more structured extraction, we recommend combining it with custom parsers or AI models.

6. How can I extract metadata from PDFs or DOCX files?

The File to Text API extracts content, but not embedded metadata (like author, creation date, etc.). If you need file-level metadata, a separate API for file introspection is in the works at ApyHub.

7. Is there rate limiting on these APIs?

Yes. Each API has a free tier with daily limits. If you need higher throughput or commercial usage, we offer affordable upgrade plans.

8. Can I extract data in bulk (e.g., multiple URLs or files at once)?

Currently, APIs are designed for single-item processing per request to maintain speed and reliability. Bulk processing can be done in batches using asynchronous workflows or Fusion plugins.

9. Can I extract data from password-protected files?

No, our File to Text API does not support password-protected files at the moment for security and privacy reasons.

10. Are there APIs that help extract data from APIs themselves (like API responses)?

While we don’t have a dedicated "API response parser" yet, you can use ApyHub's JSON tools to clean, transform, or flatten API responses for further processing.