Claude vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only Claude supports handwriting, multilingual; only SmolDocling supports bounding boxes.
Claudeanthropic/claude | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Vision model | Open source |
| Price | 14 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $14.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 2.6 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Long dense documents | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 50+ languages | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 100 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | No | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | 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
SmolDocling
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": "anthropic/claude",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}