Docling vs PaddleOCR (PP-OCR)
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) is cheaper per page; PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) is faster; only Docling supports tables, math; only PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) supports confidence, multilingual.
Doclingibm/docling | PaddleOCR (PP-OCR)paddle/paddleocr | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 2 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 2.2 s / page | 0.7 s / page |
| Best for | Structured export for RAG | Fast printed text, Chinese and English |
| Inputs | PDF, images, DOCX | PDF, images |
| Languages | Latin scripts, CJK | 80+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | No |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | No |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | ✓ Yes |
| 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
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": "ibm/docling",
"fallbacks": ["paddle/paddleocr"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}