Surya vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only Surya supports multilingual; only SmolDocling supports math.
Suryadatalab/surya | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 2 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.5 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Layout and line-level OCR | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 90+ languages | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | No | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | No |
| 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
Surya
Open-source OCR toolkit with line detection, layout analysis, reading order and tables.
Surya 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": "datalab/surya",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}