Which is cheaper, Mistral OCR or Qwen-VL?

Qwen-VL. Mistral OCR is 6 credits / page and Qwen-VL is 2 credits / page.

Which is more accurate?

It depends on the document. Mistral OCR is strongest at high-volume pdf to markdown, and Qwen-VL at flexible extraction with prompts. Run a few of your own files through both and compare the output.

Yes. Put one as model and the other in fallbacks. If the first fails, the second reads the page, and you pay only for the one that answered.

Mistral OCR vs Qwen-VL

Qwen-VL is cheaper per page; Mistral OCR is faster; only Qwen-VL supports handwriting.

Get API key All models

	Mistral OCR`mistral/mistral-ocr`	Qwen-VL`qwen/qwen-vl`
Type	OCR API	Open source
Price	6 credits / page	2 credits / page
Per 1,000 pages	$6.00	$2.00
Typical speed	0.9 s / page	2.0 s / page
Best for	High-volume PDF to Markdown	Flexible extraction with prompts
Inputs	PDF, images	PDF, images
Languages	100+ languages	30+ languages
Max pages per request	1,000	200
Tables	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
Handwriting	No	✓ Yes
Math	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
Bounding boxes	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
Confidence	No	No
Forms	No	No
Multilingual	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
On OCRRouter	Available	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

Mistral OCR

Fast document OCR that returns clean Markdown with tables and embedded images.

Mistral OCR details

Qwen-VL

Alibaba's open-weight vision language models (Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen3-VL). Strong general OCR and grounding.

Qwen-VL details

Use one, fall back to the other

Request body

{
  "model": "mistral/mistral-ocr",
  "fallbacks": ["qwen/qwen-vl"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

More comparisons

Mistral OCR vs Granite Docling Mistral OCR vs Hunyuan OCR Gemini Flash vs Qwen-VL Qwen-VL vs Adobe Acrobat OCR Mistral OCR vs Google Document AI Qwen-VL vs OCR.space Mistral OCR vs Nanonets-OCR Mistral OCR vs Marker

Mistral OCR alternatives Qwen-VL alternatives