Azure Document Intelligence alternative
Azure's prebuilt models are good, and closed. Anything off the list means a custom model to label and train. On Meibel you define the schema once and it holds across every document type.
Meibel vs Azure Document Intelligence
Document services priced separately: Read for OCR, Content Understanding and Layout for structure, prebuilt models for known types such as invoices and receipts, and custom models for the rest. It returns content with per-field confidence. Search is Azure AI Search, a separate product.
Documents become data. Data becomes agents. Meibel reads any document zero-shot into a schema you define, stores it for search and SQL, scores every step, and runs agents on it inside our guardrails, we call them Hardrails.
What you still build
Zero-shot. Define the schema and run it. No labeled examples, no retraining.
Prebuilt models cover known types. Anything else needs a custom model: label, train, evaluate, retrain when the layout changes.
No practical page ceiling, up to 1 GB.
2,000 pages per request, the highest limit we found.
One schema across every format, so the whole set is one dataset.
A model per document type and a response per document. Normalizing them is downstream work.
Semantic search and SQL over the extracted tables, on one corpus.
Azure AI Search is a separate product. No SQL layer over extracted tables.
Every step scored on the checks you choose. You decide what a low score triggers: a retry, a person or a gate.
Confidence per field. Routing and review are your code.
Agents built, versioned and run on the same data, inside Hardrails that set what each one can see and call.
Not in Document Intelligence. Azure RBAC controls API access, not what a model reads at query time.
What Meibel adds
Document types nobody prebuilt come back in your schema, each value scored and located.
Extracted tables land in a database. Agents write SQL, so the database does the math, not the model.
Run them in Copilot, Claude, your own apps or in batch, with every step scored and sourced.
Azure, on the parse. Read is $0.0015 a page and Content Understanding is $0.005, below our $0.008 text page. The difference buys what sits around the parse: no training projects, one dataset, search and SQL, scoring and agents.
No. Meibel runs on Microsoft Azure or in your own Azure tenant, and you can buy it through Microsoft Marketplace on your Microsoft agreement. Your storage and the models you already use stay as they are, and LLM costs pass through at cost.
Not if it works. Keep it for that document type. The case for Meibel is the next ten document types, and the next time a supplier changes a layout.
When your documents are on the prebuilt list, such as invoices, receipts and IDs, and a parse is all you need. Use it.
Try it on the one there's no model for
The supplier certificate. The inspection form with handwriting on it. Define your schema and get it back, scored and sourced, with no training set.
Based on Microsoft's public pricing, custom model and service limit documentation for Azure AI Document Intelligence and Content Understanding, retrieved September 2026. We update this page when products change. See the use cases.