Which is cheaper, Docling or TrOCR?

TrOCR. Docling is 2 credits / page and TrOCR is 1 credit / page.

Which is more accurate?

It depends on the document. Docling is strongest at structured export for rag, and TrOCR at handwritten text lines. Run a few of your own files through both and compare the output.

Yes. Put one as model and the other in fallbacks. If the first fails, the second reads the page, and you pay only for the one that answered.

Docling vs TrOCR

TrOCR is cheaper per page; TrOCR is faster; only Docling supports tables, math, bounding boxes; only TrOCR supports handwriting.

Get API key All models

	Docling`ibm/docling`	TrOCR`microsoft/trocr`
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	1.2 s / page
Best for	Structured export for RAG	Handwritten text lines
Inputs	PDF, images, DOCX	images
Languages	Latin scripts, CJK	English
Max pages per request	500	100
Tables	✓ Yes	No
Handwriting	No	✓ Yes
Math	✓ Yes	No
Bounding boxes	✓ Yes	No
Confidence	No	No
Forms	No	No
Multilingual	No	No
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

Docling

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

Docling details

TrOCR

Transformer text recognition model. Reads single text lines, including handwriting.

TrOCR details

Use one, fall back to the other

Request body

{
  "model": "ibm/docling",
  "fallbacks": ["microsoft/trocr"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

More comparisons

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