Qianfan OCR vs PaddleOCR-VL
Qianfan OCR is cheaper per page; PaddleOCR-VL is faster; only Qianfan OCR supports handwriting; only PaddleOCR-VL supports bounding boxes, confidence.
Qianfan OCRbaidu/qianfan-ocr | PaddleOCR-VLpaddle/paddleocr-vl | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | OCR API | Open source |
| Price | 1 credits / page | 2 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $1.00 | $2.00 |
| Typical speed | 2.0 s / page | 1.3 s / page |
| Best for | Chinese documents | CJK documents |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | Chinese, English and more | 109 languages |
| Max pages per request | 200 | 500 |
| Tables | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Handwriting | ✓ Yes | No |
| Math | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Bounding boxes | No | ✓ 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
Qianfan OCR
Baidu's OCR-tuned vision model. Strong on Chinese documents and tables.
Qianfan 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": "baidu/qianfan-ocr",
"fallbacks": ["paddle/paddleocr-vl"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}