TrOCR vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is faster; only TrOCR supports handwriting; only SmolDocling supports tables, math, bounding boxes.
TrOCRmicrosoft/trocr | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 1 credit / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.2 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Handwritten text lines | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | images | PDF, images |
| Languages | English | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 100 | 500 |
| Tables | No | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | No | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | No | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | No | 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
TrOCR
Transformer text recognition model. Reads single text lines, including handwriting.
TrOCR 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": "microsoft/trocr",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}