Marker vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only Marker supports multilingual.
Markerdatalab/marker | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | OCR API | Open source |
| Price | 14 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $14.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 2.5 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Books and research papers | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images, DOCX | PDF, images |
| Languages | 90+ 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
Marker
Hosted version of the open-source Marker and Surya models. Strong on books and papers.
Marker 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": "datalab/marker",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}