SmolDocling vs Google Cloud Vision OCR
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; only SmolDocling supports tables, math; only Google Cloud Vision OCR supports handwriting, confidence, multilingual.
SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | Google Cloud Vision OCRgoogle/cloud-vision | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | OCR API |
| Price | 1 credit / page | 2 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $2.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.0 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Very cheap page conversion | Photos and simple scans |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | Mainly English | 100+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 2,000 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | No |
| Handwriting | No | ✓ Yes |
| Math | ✓ Yes | No |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | ✓ Yes |
| 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
SmolDocling
Tiny 256M vision model from Hugging Face and IBM that outputs DocTags. Predecessor of Granite Docling.
SmolDocling detailsGoogle Cloud Vision OCR
Google Cloud's image OCR with text and document text detection, word boxes and confidence.
Google Cloud Vision OCR detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "huggingface/smoldocling",
"fallbacks": ["google/cloud-vision"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}Questions
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