Kraken vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is faster; only Kraken supports handwriting, multilingual; only SmolDocling supports tables, math.
Krakenkraken/kraken | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 1 credit / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.5 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Historical documents and manuscripts | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | images | PDF, images |
| Languages | Many scripts, incl. right-to-left | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | No | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | No | ✓ 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
Kraken
OCR engine for historical documents and manuscripts, with trainable models for unusual scripts.
Kraken 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": "kraken/kraken",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}