head to head · open source
Understand-Anything vs md-to-pdf
Understand-Anything has 83,188 GitHub stars, 7,017 forks, 303 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. md-to-pdf has 1,952 stars, 161 forks, 47 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. Understand-Anything leads on adoption by 4,162% (83,188 vs 1,952 stars). Understand-Anything is written in TypeScript under MIT; md-to-pdf is written in TypeScript under MIT. Understand-Anything has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, md-to-pdf 8%. Understand-Anything was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Understand-Anything | md-to-pdf | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 83K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-12 | 2025-12-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.0K | ⑂ 161 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Understand-Anything if
- You weight community size — 83K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick md-to-pdf if
- You want the md-to-pdf feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and md-to-pdf fits your workflow better
About Understand-Anything
Understand Anything is an open source TypeScript project, released under the MIT license and developed by Egonex from an original creation by Lum1104. It ships as a plugin for Claude Code and also works with Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI and other agent platforms. The project analyzes a codebase through a multi agent pipeline that extracts every file, function, class and dependency, then builds a knowledge graph which it presents in an interactive dashboard. A hosted live demo is available on the project homepage for anyone who wants to pan, zoom, search and explore without running the analysis locally.…
read the full Understand-Anything overview →
About md-to-pdf
Markdown to PDF A simple and hackable CLI tool for converting markdown to pdf . It uses Marked to convert markdown to html and Puppeteer (headless Chromium) to further convert the html to pdf . It also uses highlight.js for code highlighting. The whole source code of this tool is only \ 250 lines of JS 500 lines of Typescript and 100 lines of CSS, so it is easy to clone and customize. Highlights: Concurrently convert multiple Markdown files Watch mode Use your own or remote stylesheets/scripts Front matter for configuration Headers and Footers Page Breaks Syntax highlighting in code blocks Extend the options of t…
read the full md-to-pdf overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Understand-Anything or md-to-pdf more popular?
Understand-Anything has 83,188 GitHub stars and md-to-pdf has 1,952. Understand-Anything has the larger community by that measure.
Are Understand-Anything and md-to-pdf free?
Both are open source. Understand-Anything is licensed under MIT and md-to-pdf under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Understand-Anything and md-to-pdf?
Understand-Anything is written in TypeScript and md-to-pdf in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Understand-Anything or md-to-pdf?
Choose Understand-Anything if you want the larger community (83,188 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose md-to-pdf if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.