Which is cheaper, Qwen-VL or Unstructured?

Qwen-VL. Qwen-VL is 2 credits / page and Unstructured is 20 credits / page.

Which is more accurate?

It depends on the document. Qwen-VL is strongest at flexible extraction with prompts, and Unstructured at mixed file types into rag. Run a few of your own files through both and compare the output.

Yes. Put one as model and the other in fallbacks. If the first fails, the second reads the page, and you pay only for the one that answered.

Qwen-VL vs Unstructured

Qwen-VL is cheaper per page; Qwen-VL is faster; only Qwen-VL supports handwriting, math.

Get API key All models

	Qwen-VL`qwen/qwen-vl`	Unstructured`unstructured/unstructured`
Type	Open source	OCR API
Price	2 credits / page	20 credits / page
Per 1,000 pages	$2.00	$20.00
Typical speed	2.0 s / page	3.0 s / page
Best for	Flexible extraction with prompts	Mixed file types into RAG
Inputs	PDF, images	PDF, images, DOCX
Languages	30+ languages	Multilingual
Max pages per request	200	1,000
Tables	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
Handwriting	✓ Yes	No
Math	✓ Yes	No
Bounding boxes	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
Confidence	No	No
Forms	No	No
Multilingual	✓ Yes	✓ 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

Qwen-VL

Alibaba's open-weight vision language models (Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen3-VL). Strong general OCR and grounding.

Qwen-VL details

Unstructured

Document ETL for RAG. Partitions many file types into typed elements; open-source library too.

Unstructured details

Use one, fall back to the other

Request body

{
  "model": "qwen/qwen-vl",
  "fallbacks": ["unstructured/unstructured"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

More comparisons

Qwen-VL vs Chunkr Qwen-VL vs OCR.space Granite Docling vs Unstructured Hunyuan OCR vs Unstructured Kraken vs Qwen-VL Reducto Parse vs Qwen-VL GLM-OCR vs Unstructured Qwen-VL vs SmolDocling

Qwen-VL alternatives Unstructured alternatives