DeepSeek-OCR vs Qwen-VL
DeepSeek-OCR is cheaper per page; DeepSeek-OCR is faster; only Qwen-VL supports handwriting.
DeepSeek-OCRdeepseek/deepseek-ocr | Qwen-VLqwen/qwen-vl | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 1 credit / page | 2 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $2.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.1 s / page | 2.0 s / page |
| Best for | Cheap bulk conversion | Flexible extraction with prompts |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 100+ languages | 30+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 200 | 200 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | ✓ Yes |
| Math | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| On OCRRouter | Available | Coming soon |
Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.
What each one is
Qwen-VL
Alibaba's open-weight vision language models (Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen3-VL). Strong general OCR and grounding.
Qwen-VL detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "deepseek/deepseek-ocr",
"fallbacks": ["qwen/qwen-vl"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}