PaddleOCR-VL vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only PaddleOCR-VL supports confidence, multilingual.
PaddleOCR-VLpaddle/paddleocr-vl | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 2 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.3 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | CJK documents | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 109 languages | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | ✓ Yes | 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
PaddleOCR-VL
Open-source document model from Baidu. Excellent on Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
PaddleOCR-VL 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": "paddle/paddleocr-vl",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}