Docling vs OCR.space
OCR.space is cheaper per page; OCR.space is faster; only Docling supports math; only OCR.space supports multilingual.
Doclingibm/docling | OCR.spaceocrspace/ocr-space | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | OCR API |
| Price | 2 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 2.2 s / page | 1.5 s / page |
| Best for | Structured export for RAG | Cheap simple OCR |
| Inputs | PDF, images, DOCX | PDF, images |
| Languages | Latin scripts, CJK | 20+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 100 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | No |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| 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
OCR.space
Low-cost OCR API with a large free tier. Returns text, word boxes and searchable PDFs.
OCR.space detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "ibm/docling",
"fallbacks": ["ocrspace/ocr-space"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}