PaddleOCR-VL vs Tesseract
Tesseract is cheaper per page; Tesseract is faster; only PaddleOCR-VL supports tables, math, bounding boxes, confidence.
PaddleOCR-VLpaddle/paddleocr-vl | Tesseracttesseract/tesseract | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Price | 2 credits / page | Free |
| Per 1,000 pages | $2.00 | $0.00 |
| Typical speed | 1.3 s / page | 0.6 s / page |
| Best for | CJK documents | Clean printed text, free |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 109 languages | 100+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | No |
| Handwriting | No | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | No |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ Yes | No |
| Confidence | ✓ Yes | No |
| 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
PaddleOCR-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": "paddle/paddleocr-vl",
"fallbacks": ["tesseract/tesseract"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}