SmolDocling vs Unstructured
SmolDocling is cheaper per page; SmolDocling is faster; only SmolDocling supports math; only Unstructured supports multilingual.
SmolDoclinghuggingface/smoldocling | Unstructuredunstructured/unstructured | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | OCR API |
| Price | 1 credit / page | 20 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $20.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.0 s / page | 3.0 s / page |
| Best for | Very cheap page conversion | Mixed file types into RAG |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images, DOCX |
| Languages | Mainly English | Multilingual |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 1,000 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | No |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ 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
SmolDocling
Tiny 256M vision model from Hugging Face and IBM that outputs DocTags. Predecessor of Granite Docling.
SmolDocling detailsUnstructured
Document ETL for RAG. Partitions many file types into typed elements; open-source library too.
Unstructured detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "huggingface/smoldocling",
"fallbacks": ["unstructured/unstructured"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}