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TrOCR vs Qwen-VL

TrOCR is cheaper per page; TrOCR is faster; only Qwen-VL supports tables, math, bounding boxes, multilingual.

TrOCRmicrosoft/trocrQwen-VLqwen/qwen-vl
TypeOpen sourceOpen source
Price1 credit / page2 credits / page
Per 1,000 pages$1.00$2.00
Typical speed1.2 s / page2.0 s / page
Best forHandwritten text linesFlexible extraction with prompts
InputsimagesPDF, images
LanguagesEnglish30+ languages
Max pages per request100200
TablesNo✓ Yes
Handwriting✓ Yes✓ Yes
MathNo✓ Yes
Bounding boxesNo✓ Yes
ConfidenceNoNo
FormsNoNo
MultilingualNo✓ Yes
On OCRRouterComing soonComing soon

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

What each one is

TrOCR

Transformer text recognition model. Reads single text lines, including handwriting.

TrOCR details

Qwen-VL

Alibaba's open-weight vision language models (Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen3-VL). Strong general OCR and grounding.

Qwen-VL details

Use one, fall back to the other

Request body
{
  "model": "microsoft/trocr",
  "fallbacks": ["qwen/qwen-vl"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

More comparisons

TrOCR alternativesQwen-VL alternatives