Mistral OCR vs PaddleOCR-VL
PaddleOCR-VL is cheaper per page; Mistral OCR is faster; only PaddleOCR-VL supports confidence.
Mistral OCRmistral/mistral-ocr | PaddleOCR-VLpaddle/paddleocr-vl | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | OCR API | Open source |
| Price | 6 credits / page | 2 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $6.00 | $2.00 |
| Typical speed | 0.9 s / page | 1.3 s / page |
| Best for | High-volume PDF to Markdown | CJK documents |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 100+ languages | 109 languages |
| Max pages per request | 1,000 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | ✓ Yes |
| Forms | No | No |
| Multilingual | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| On OCRRouter | Available | Available |
Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.
What each one is
Mistral OCR
Fast document OCR that returns clean Markdown with tables and embedded images.
Mistral OCR detailsPaddleOCR-VL
Open-source document model from Baidu. Excellent on Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
PaddleOCR-VL detailsTry both on your own file
Run the file once with each model and compare the output.
Result
Your Markdown or JSON shows up here.
Use one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "mistral/mistral-ocr",
"fallbacks": ["paddle/paddleocr-vl"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}