DeepSeek-OCR vs MinerU

DeepSeek-OCR is free, with no paid plan attached. MinerU is free, with no paid plan attached. Both are listed under AI OCR & Document Extraction, so this is a like-for-like comparison. Neither is ranked above the other — Flocci carries no sponsored placement.

DeepSeek-OCR vs MinerU — straight answers

DeepSeek-OCR vs MinerU: what is the difference?

DeepSeek-OCR is free, with no paid plan attached and is listed for vision-language OCR that compresses document context optically. MinerU is free, with no paid plan attached and is listed for parses PDFs, images and Office files into Markdown, JSON, HTML or LaTeX. Both sit in AI OCR & Document Extraction.

Is DeepSeek-OCR or MinerU cheaper to start with?

Neither — DeepSeek-OCR and MinerU are both free, so the choice comes down to capability rather than cost. Both entries list what they uniquely do above.

Which should I choose, DeepSeek-OCR or MinerU?

Choose DeepSeek-OCR if you need vision-language OCR that compresses document context optically; choose MinerU if you need parses PDFs, images and Office files into Markdown, JSON, HTML or LaTeX. Flocci AI Tools does not rank one above the other — it shows both feature sets side by side and lets the requirement decide.

DeepSeek-OCR compared with MinerU: pricing tier, category, listed capabilities and links.
 DeepSeek-OCRMinerU
Pricing tierFreeFree
Free to startYesYes
CategoryResearch & LearningResearch & Learning
TypeAI OCR & Document ExtractionAI OCR & Document Extraction
Listed capabilities
  • Vision-language OCR that compresses document context optically
  • Document-to-Markdown, layout detection and figure parsing
  • Multiple resolution modes up to 1280x1280
  • MIT license; DeepSeek-OCR2 released Jan 2026
  • Parses PDFs, images and Office files into Markdown, JSON, HTML or LaTeX
  • Runs fully locally with OCR, table and formula recognition
  • Free hosted web app at mineru.net plus agent-ready outputs
  • Version 4.0 adds four parsing quality tiers
Tagsdeepseek ocr, deepseek-ocr 2, contexts optical compression, free ocr model, pdf to markdown deepseekmineru, pdf to markdown free, open source pdf parser, mineru ocr, document parsing for llm, mineru.net
Websitegithub.comgithub.com
Full pageDeepSeek-OCR details →MinerU details →
AlternativesDeepSeek-OCR alternatives →MinerU alternatives →

dots.ocr (dots.mocr)

AI OCR & Document Extraction
free
  • 3B vision-language model for layout parsing across many scripts
  • Converts charts and diagrams into SVG code
  • Scores 83.9 on olmOCR-bench
  • MIT licensed with free live demo

LangExtract (Google)

AI OCR & Document Extraction
free
  • Python library extracting structured data from unstructured text with LLMs
  • Maps each extraction to its exact source span
  • Works with Gemini, OpenAI and local Ollama models
  • Interactive HTML visualization of results

olmOCR

AI OCR & Document Extraction
free
  • Apache 2.0 open-source OCR toolkit from Ai2, 19.3k GitHub stars
  • Vision-language-model based, handles equations/tables/multi-column layout
  • Runs at a fraction of commercial OCR cost on a 7B model

PaddleOCR-VL

AI OCR & Document Extraction
free
  • 1B-parameter document parsing VLM (NaViT encoder + ERNIE-4.5-0.3B)
  • Handles text, tables, formulas, charts and handwriting
  • Supports 109 languages including Hindi and Arabic
  • Apache 2.0; newer PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 available

Docling

AI OCR & Document Extraction
free
  • MIT-licensed, 64.7k GitHub stars, IBM Research-originated, now under LF AI & Data Foundation
  • Advanced PDF layout + table structure recognition, local execution
  • Exports to Markdown/HTML/JSON, integrates with LangChain/LlamaIndex

Dolphin (ByteDance)

AI OCR & Document Extraction
free
  • Two-stage document-type and layout analysis then element parsing
  • Page-level and element-level parsing modes
  • Hugging Face Transformers integration
  • MIT licensed; Dolphin-v2 released Dec 2025