Gemini Flash vs SmolDocling
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only Gemini Flash supports handwriting, multilingual; only SmolDocling supports bounding boxes.
Gemini Flashgoogle/gemini-flash | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Vision model | Open source |
| Price | 3 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $3.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.6 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Handwriting and mixed layouts | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 100+ languages | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 1,000 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | No | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | No |
| On OCRRouter | Available | 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
Gemini Flash
General vision model with strong handwriting and layout understanding at a low price.
Gemini Flash detailsSmolDocling
Tiny 256M vision model from Hugging Face and IBM that outputs DocTags. Predecessor of Granite Docling.
SmolDocling detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "google/gemini-flash",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}