olmOCR vs OCR.space
OCR.space is cheaper per page; only olmOCR supports math, handwriting; only OCR.space supports bounding boxes, multilingual.
olmOCRallenai/olmocr | OCR.spaceocrspace/ocr-space | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | OCR API |
| Price | 2 credits / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.5 s / page | 1.5 s / page |
| Best for | Bulk PDF to text for datasets | Cheap simple OCR |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | Mainly English | 20+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 1,000 | 100 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | No |
| Bounding boxes | No | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | No | ✓ Yes |
| 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
olmOCR
Open-source vision model from Ai2 that turns PDFs into clean, reading-order text.
olmOCR detailsOCR.space
Low-cost OCR API with a large free tier. Returns text, word boxes and searchable PDFs.
OCR.space detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "allenai/olmocr",
"fallbacks": ["ocrspace/ocr-space"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}