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Tesseract vs Qwen-VL

Tesseract is cheaper per page; Tesseract is faster; only Qwen-VL supports tables, handwriting, math, bounding boxes.

Tesseracttesseract/tesseractQwen-VLqwen/qwen-vl
TypeOpen sourceOpen source
PriceFree2 credits / page
Per 1,000 pages$0.00$2.00
Typical speed0.6 s / page2.0 s / page
Best forClean printed text, freeFlexible extraction with prompts
InputsPDF, imagesPDF, images
Languages100+ languages30+ languages
Max pages per request500200
TablesNo✓ Yes
HandwritingNo✓ Yes
MathNo✓ Yes
Bounding boxesNo✓ Yes
ConfidenceNoNo
FormsNoNo
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
On OCRRouterAvailableComing soon

Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.

What each one is

Tesseract

The classic open-source OCR engine. Plain text from clean printed scans.

Tesseract details

Qwen-VL

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

Qwen-VL details

Use one, fall back to the other

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

Questions

More comparisons

Tesseract alternativesQwen-VL alternatives