PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) vs Qwen-VL
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) is cheaper per page; PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) is faster; only PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) supports confidence; only Qwen-VL supports tables, handwriting, math.
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR)paddle/paddleocr | 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 | 0.7 s / page | 2.0 s / page |
| Best for | Fast printed text, Chinese and English | Flexible extraction with prompts |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 80+ languages | 30+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 200 |
| Tables | No | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | ✓ Yes |
| Math | No | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | ✓ Yes | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | ✓ 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
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR)
Baidu's classic open-source text detection and recognition pipeline. Light enough to run on CPU.
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) detailsQwen-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": "paddle/paddleocr",
"fallbacks": ["qwen/qwen-vl"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}