Docling vs Tesseract
Tesseract is cheaper per page; Tesseract is faster; only Docling supports tables, math, bounding boxes; only Tesseract supports multilingual.
Doclingibm/docling | Tesseracttesseract/tesseract | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 2 credits / page | Free |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $0.00 |
| Typical speed | 2.2 s / page | 0.6 s / page |
| Best for | Structured export for RAG | Clean printed text, free |
| Inputs | PDF, images, DOCX | PDF, images |
| Languages | Latin scripts, CJK | 100+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | No |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | No |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | No |
| Confidence | No | No |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | No | ✓ Yes |
| On OCRRouter | Coming soon | Available |
Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.
What each one is
Use one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "ibm/docling",
"fallbacks": ["tesseract/tesseract"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}