PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) vs SmolDocling
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) is faster; only PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) supports confidence, multilingual; only SmolDocling supports tables, math.
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR)paddle/paddleocr | SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 1 credit / page | 1 credit / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $1.00 |
| Typical speed | 0.7 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Fast printed text, Chinese and English | Very cheap page conversion |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 80+ languages | Mainly English |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | No | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | No | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | ✓ Yes | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | 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
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR)
Baidu's classic open-source text detection and recognition pipeline. Light enough to run on CPU.
PaddleOCR (PP-OCR) 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": "paddle/paddleocr",
"fallbacks": ["huggingface/smoldocling"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}