Tesseract vs PaddleOCR (PP-OCR)
Tesseract is cheaper per page; Tesseract is faster; only PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) supports bounding boxes, confidence.
Tesseracttesseract/tesseract | PaddleOCR (PP-OCR)paddle/paddleocr | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | Free | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $0.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 0.6 s / page | 0.7 s / page |
| Best for | Clean printed text, free | Fast printed text, Chinese and English |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 100+ languages | 80+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | No | No |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | No | No |
| Bounding boxes | No | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | ✓ Yes |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| 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 (PP-OCR)
Baidu's classic open-source text detection and recognition pipeline. Light enough to run on CPU.
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "tesseract/tesseract",
"fallbacks": ["paddle/paddleocr"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}