> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://unstructured-53-docs-243-plugins.mintlify.site/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Overview

The Unstructured API consists of two parts:

* The [Unstructured Workflow Endpoint](/api-reference/workflow/overview) enables a full range of partitioning, chunking, embedding, and
  enrichment options for your files and data. It is designed to batch-process files and data in remote locations; send processed results to
  various storage, databases, and vector stores; and use the latest and highest-performing models on the market today. It has built-in logic
  to deliver the highest quality results at the lowest cost. [Learn more](/api-reference/workflow/overview).
* The [Unstructured Partition Endpoint](/api-reference/partition/overview) is intended for rapid prototyping of Unstructured's
  various partitioning strategies, with limited support for chunking. It is designed to work only with processing of local files, one file
  at a time. Use the [Unstructured Workflow Endpoint](/api-reference/workflow/overview) for production-level scenarios, file processing in
  batches, files and data in remote locations, generating embeddings, applying post-transform enrichments, using the latest and
  highest-performing models, and for the highest quality results at the lowest cost. [Learn more](/api-reference/partition/overview).

# Benefits over open source

The Unstructured API provides the following benefits beyond the [Unstructured open source library](/open-source/introduction/overview) offering:

* Designed for production scenarios.
* Significantly increased performance on document and table extraction.
* Access to newer and more sophisticated vision transformer models.
* Access to Unstructured's fine-tuned OCR models.
* Access to Unstructured's by-page and by-similarity chunking strategies.
* Adherence to security and SOC2 Type 1, SOC2 Type 2, and HIPAA compliance standards.
* Authentication and identity management.
* Incremental data loading.
* Image extraction from documents.
* More sophisticated document hierarchy detection.
* Unstructured manages code dependencies, for instance for libraries such as Tesseract.
* Unstructured manages its own infrastructure, including parallelization and other performance optimizations.

## Get support

Should you require any assistance or have any questions regarding the Unstructured API, please [contact us directly](https://unstructured.io/contact).