Google Document AI vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only Google Document AI supports forms, handwriting, confidence, multilingual; only SmolDocling supports math.
Google Document AIgoogle/document-ai | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | OCR API | Open source |
| Price | 3 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $3.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.4 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Multilingual scans | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 200+ languages | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | No | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | ✓ Yes | No |
| Forms | ✓ Yes | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | No |
| 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
Google Document AI
Google Cloud OCR with layout parsing and specialised processors.
Google Document AI detailsSmolDocling
Tiny 256M vision model from Hugging Face and IBM that outputs DocTags. Predecessor of Granite Docling.
SmolDocling detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "google/document-ai",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}