TrOCR vs Unstructured
TrOCR is cheaper per page; TrOCR is faster; only TrOCR supports handwriting; only Unstructured supports tables, bounding boxes, multilingual.
TrOCRmicrosoft/trocr | Unstructuredunstructured/unstructured | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | OCR API |
| Price | 1 credit / page | 20 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $20.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.2 s / page | 3.0 s / page |
| Best for | Handwritten text lines | Mixed file types into RAG |
| Inputs | images | PDF, images, DOCX |
| Languages | English | Multilingual |
| Max pages per request | 100 | 1,000 |
| Tables | No | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | No | No |
| Bounding boxes | No | ✓ 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
TrOCR
Transformer text recognition model. Reads single text lines, including handwriting.
TrOCR 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": "microsoft/trocr",
"fallbacks": ["unstructured/unstructured"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}