MinerU vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only MinerU supports multilingual.
MinerUopendatalab/mineru | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 2 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 2.0 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Academic PDFs | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 80+ languages | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 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
MinerU
Open-source PDF to Markdown pipeline popular for academic and Chinese documents.
MinerU 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": "opendatalab/mineru",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}