Gemini Flash vs PaddleOCR-VL
PaddleOCR-VL is cheaper per page; PaddleOCR-VL is faster; only Gemini Flash supports handwriting; only PaddleOCR-VL supports bounding boxes, confidence.
Gemini Flashgoogle/gemini-flash | PaddleOCR-VLpaddle/paddleocr-vl | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Vision model | Open source |
| Price | 3 credits / page | 2 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $3.00 | $2.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.6 s / page | 1.3 s / page |
| Best for | Handwriting and mixed layouts | CJK documents |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 100+ languages | 109 languages |
| Max pages per request | 1,000 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | No | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | ✓ Yes |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| On OCRRouter | Available | Available |
Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.
What each one is
Gemini Flash
General vision model with strong handwriting and layout understanding at a low price.
Gemini Flash detailsPaddleOCR-VL
Open-source document model from Baidu. Excellent on Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
PaddleOCR-VL detailsTry both on your own file
Run the file once with each model and compare the output.
Result
Your Markdown or JSON shows up here.
Use one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "google/gemini-flash",
"fallbacks": ["paddle/paddleocr-vl"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}