Unlimited OCR vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only Unlimited OCR supports multilingual.
Unlimited OCRbaidu/unlimited-ocr | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 2 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.2 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Books and very long documents | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 30+ languages | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 1,000 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | 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
Unlimited OCR
Open-source model from Baidu that reads hundreds of pages in one pass with flat memory use.
Unlimited OCR 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": "baidu/unlimited-ocr",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}