IBM Datacap vs. Extend

Streamline the capture, recognition, and classification of business documents using IBM® Datacap software, a vital part of the IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation. This innovative software significantly boosts document management efficiency by incorporating cutting-edge technologies such as natural language processing, text analytics, and machine learning to effectively identify, classify, and extract data from unstructured and diverse paper documents. It supports input from a variety of channels, including scanners, faxes, emails, digital files like PDFs, and images obtained from mobile devices and applications. By utilizing machine learning capabilities, it simplifies the processing of complex or unfamiliar formats, facilitating the management of highly variable documents that conventional systems struggle with. Moreover, it provides the flexibility to export documents and data to a range of applications and content repositories, both from IBM and third-party providers. Users benefit from a user-friendly point-and-click interface that enables rapid configuration of capture workflows and applications, which greatly speeds up the deployment process. This efficient methodology not only boosts productivity but also guarantees a more integrated document management experience, ultimately allowing businesses to focus more on their core operations. As a result, organizations can achieve better outcomes and enhance their decision-making processes.

Extend is a next-generation document processing platform designed to transform unstructured, multi-format documents into high-quality, structured data with exceptional accuracy. Its advanced multimodal vision models are built to interpret even the most challenging layouts, from financial statements and contracts to handwritten forms and operational documents. Extend’s autonomous agent layer analyzes documents, runs targeted experiments, and refines extraction schemas to deliver the highest possible accuracy. Developers can use Extend’s flexible APIs to perform parsing, classification, extraction, and document splitting, or embed frictionless user-facing flows directly into their applications. Back-office teams benefit from confidence scoring, automated validations, and human-in-the-loop review tools that ensure data quality at scale. Extend’s memory system improves continuously by learning from past documents, reducing recurring errors and optimizing performance for similar files. The platform includes a complete evaluation suite that allows teams to benchmark accuracy, validate improvements, and deploy new pipelines with confidence. Extend shortens development cycles by replacing months of infrastructure work with instant, production-ready components. Trusted by startups and global enterprises alike, Extend powers high-volume document automation across industries such as financial services, logistics, healthcare, and real estate. With Extend, organizations can move from prototype to fully deployed, high-accuracy document pipelines in just days.