SmolDocling vs Adobe Acrobat OCR
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only SmolDocling supports tables, math, bounding boxes; only Adobe Acrobat OCR supports multilingual.
SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | Adobe Acrobat OCRadobe/acrobat-ocr | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | OCR API |
| Price | 1 credit / page | 14 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $14.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.0 s / page | 2.0 s / page |
| Best for | Very cheap page conversion | Searchable PDFs in Acrobat |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | Mainly English | Major European and Asian languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 1,000 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | No |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | No |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | No |
| Confidence | No | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | No | ✓ Yes |
| 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
SmolDocling
Tiny 256M vision model from Hugging Face and IBM that outputs DocTags. Predecessor of Granite Docling.
SmolDocling detailsAdobe Acrobat OCR
OCR built into Acrobat desktop. Adobe PDF Services API also offers OCR. Price is an estimate.
Adobe Acrobat OCR detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "huggingface/smoldocling",
"fallbacks": ["adobe/acrobat-ocr"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}