Docling vs Adobe Acrobat OCR
Docling is cheaper per page; Adobe Acrobat OCR is faster; only Docling supports tables, math, bounding boxes; only Adobe Acrobat OCR supports multilingual.
Doclingibm/docling | Adobe Acrobat OCRadobe/acrobat-ocr | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | OCR API |
| Price | 2 credits / page | 14 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $14.00 |
| Typical speed | 2.2 s / page | 2.0 s / page |
| Best for | Structured export for RAG | Searchable PDFs in Acrobat |
| Inputs | PDF, images, DOCX | PDF, images |
| Languages | Latin scripts, CJK | 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
Adobe 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": "ibm/docling",
"fallbacks": ["adobe/acrobat-ocr"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}