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PaddleOCR-VL vs Qwen-VL

PaddleOCR-VL is faster; only PaddleOCR-VL supports confidence; only Qwen-VL supports handwriting.

PaddleOCR-VLpaddle/paddleocr-vlQwen-VLqwen/qwen-vl
TypeOpen sourceOpen source
Price2 credits / page2 credits / page
Per 1,000 pages$2.00$2.00
Typical speed1.3 s / page2.0 s / page
Best forCJK documentsFlexible extraction with prompts
InputsPDF, imagesPDF, images
Languages109 languages30+ languages
Max pages per request500200
Tables✓ Yes✓ Yes
HandwritingNo✓ Yes
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Bounding boxes✓ Yes✓ Yes
Confidence✓ YesNo
FormsNoNo
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
On OCRRouterAvailableComing soon

Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.

What each one is

PaddleOCR-VL

Open-source document model from Baidu. Excellent on Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

PaddleOCR-VL 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": "paddle/paddleocr-vl",
  "fallbacks": ["qwen/qwen-vl"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

More comparisons

PaddleOCR-VL alternativesQwen-VL alternatives