RapidOCR vs SmolDocling
RapidOCR is faster; only RapidOCR supports confidence, multilingual; only SmolDocling supports tables, math.
RapidOCRrapidai/rapidocr | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 1 credit / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 0.6 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Lightweight OCR on CPU or edge | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | images | PDF, images |
| Languages | Chinese, English and more | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 100 | 500 |
| Tables | No | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | No | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | ✓ Yes | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | No |
| 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
RapidOCR
PaddleOCR models packaged for ONNX Runtime and other engines. Easy to deploy without Paddle.
RapidOCR 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": "rapidai/rapidocr",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}