Which is cheaper, Docling or Surya?

They cost the same here: 2 credits / page.

Which is more accurate?

It depends on the document. Docling is strongest at structured export for rag, and Surya at layout and line-level ocr. Run a few of your own files through both and compare the output.

Yes. Put one as model and the other in fallbacks. If the first fails, the second reads the page, and you pay only for the one that answered.

Docling vs Surya

Surya is faster; only Docling supports math; only Surya supports multilingual.

Get API key All models

	Docling`ibm/docling`	Surya`datalab/surya`
Type	Open source	Open source
Price	2 credits / page	2 credits / page
Per 1,000 pages	$2.00	$2.00
Typical speed	2.2 s / page	1.5 s / page
Best for	Structured export for RAG	Layout and line-level OCR
Inputs	PDF, images, DOCX	PDF, images
Languages	Latin scripts, CJK	90+ languages
Max pages per request	500	500
Tables	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
Handwriting	No	No
Math	✓ Yes	No
Bounding boxes	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
Confidence	No	No
Forms	No	No
Multilingual	No	✓ Yes
On OCRRouter	Coming soon	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

Docling

IBM's open-source document converter with a structured document model.

Docling details

Surya

Open-source OCR toolkit with line detection, layout analysis, reading order and tables.

Surya details

Use one, fall back to the other

Request body

{
  "model": "ibm/docling",
  "fallbacks": ["datalab/surya"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

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