Mistral OCR vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; Mistral OCR is faster; only Mistral OCR supports multilingual.
Mistral OCRmistral/mistral-ocr | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | OCR API | Open source |
| Price | 6 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $6.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 0.9 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | High-volume PDF to Markdown | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 100+ 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 | 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 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": "mistral/mistral-ocr",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}