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Docling vs SmolDocling

SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster.

Doclingibm/doclingSmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling
TypeOpen sourceOpen source
Price2 credits / page1 credit / page
Per 1,000 pages$2.00$1.00
Typical speed2.2 s / page1.0 s / page
Best forStructured export for RAGVery cheap page conversion
InputsPDF, images, DOCXPDF, images
LanguagesLatin scripts, CJKMainly English
Max pages per request500500
Tables✓ Yes✓ Yes
HandwritingNoNo
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Bounding boxes✓ Yes✓ Yes
ConfidenceNoNo
FormsNoNo
MultilingualNoNo
On OCRRouterComing soonComing soon

Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.

What each one is

Docling

IBM's open-source document converter with a structured document model.

Docling details

SmolDocling

Tiny 256M vision model from Hugging Face and IBM that outputs DocTags. Predecessor of Granite Docling.

SmolDocling details

Use one, fall back to the other

Request body
{
  "model": "ibm/docling",
  "fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

More comparisons

Docling alternativesSmolDocling alternatives