Google Document AI vs Tesseract
Tesseract is cheaper per page; Tesseract is faster; only Google Document AI supports tables, forms, handwriting, bounding boxes, confidence.
Google Document AIgoogle/document-ai | Tesseracttesseract/tesseract | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | OCR API | Open source |
| Price | 3 credits / page | Free |
| Per 1,000 pages | $3.00 | $0.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.4 s / page | 0.6 s / page |
| Best for | Multilingual scans | Clean printed text, free |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 200+ languages | 100+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | No |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | No | No |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | No |
| Confidence | ✓ Yes | No |
| Forms | ✓ Yes | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| On OCRRouter | Available | Available |
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 detailsTry both on your own file
Run the file once with each model and compare the output.
Result
Your Markdown or JSON shows up here.
Use one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "google/document-ai",
"fallbacks": ["tesseract/tesseract"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}