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EasyOCR vs SmolDocling

EasyOCR is faster; only EasyOCR supports confidence, multilingual; only SmolDocling supports tables, math.

EasyOCRjaided/easyocrSmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling
TypeOpen sourceOpen source
Price1 credit / page1 credit / page
Per 1,000 pages$1.00$1.00
Typical speed0.9 s / page1.0 s / page
Best forQuick scripts and scene textVery cheap page conversion
InputsimagesPDF, images
Languages80+ languagesMainly English
Max pages per request100500
TablesNo✓ Yes
HandwritingNoNo
MathNo✓ Yes
Bounding boxes✓ Yes✓ Yes
Confidence✓ YesNo
FormsNoNo
Multilingual✓ YesNo
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

EasyOCR

Python OCR library with a simple API. Returns text lines with boxes and confidence.

EasyOCR 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": "jaided/easyocr",
  "fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

More comparisons

EasyOCR alternativesSmolDocling alternatives