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PaddleOCR-VL vs Granite Docling

Granite Docling is cheaper per page; PaddleOCR-VL is faster; only PaddleOCR-VL supports confidence, multilingual.

PaddleOCR-VLpaddle/paddleocr-vlGranite Doclingibm/granite-docling
TypeOpen sourceOpen source
Price2 credits / page1 credit / page
Per 1,000 pages$2.00$1.00
Typical speed1.3 s / page1.5 s / page
Best forCJK documentsSmall-model document conversion
InputsPDF, imagesPDF, images
Languages109 languagesEnglish, experimental CJK and Arabic
Max pages per request500500
Tables✓ Yes✓ Yes
HandwritingNoNo
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Bounding boxes✓ Yes✓ Yes
Confidence✓ YesNo
FormsNoNo
Multilingual✓ YesNo
On OCRRouterAvailableComing soon

Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.

What each one is

PaddleOCR-VL

Open-source document model from Baidu. Excellent on Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

PaddleOCR-VL details

Granite Docling

Compact IBM vision model that converts pages to DocTags for the Docling pipeline.

Granite Docling details

Use one, fall back to the other

Request body
{
  "model": "paddle/paddleocr-vl",
  "fallbacks": ["ibm/granite-docling"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

More comparisons

PaddleOCR-VL alternativesGranite Docling alternatives