Docling vs olmOCR

Docling is free, with no paid plan attached. olmOCR 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.

Docling vs olmOCR — straight answers

Docling vs olmOCR: what is the difference?

Docling is free, with no paid plan attached and is listed for MIT-licensed, 64.7k GitHub stars, IBM Research-originated, now under LF AI & Data Foundation. olmOCR is free, with no paid plan attached and is listed for apache 2.0 open-source OCR toolkit from Ai2, 19.3k GitHub stars. Both sit in AI OCR & Document Extraction.

Is Docling or olmOCR cheaper to start with?

Neither — Docling and olmOCR 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, Docling or olmOCR?

Choose Docling if you need MIT-licensed, 64.7k GitHub stars, IBM Research-originated, now under LF AI & Data Foundation; choose olmOCR if you need apache 2.0 open-source OCR toolkit from Ai2, 19.3k GitHub stars. Flocci AI Tools does not rank one above the other — it shows both feature sets side by side and lets the requirement decide.

Docling compared with olmOCR: pricing tier, category, listed capabilities and links.
 DoclingolmOCR
Pricing tierFreeFree
Free to startYesYes
CategoryResearch & LearningResearch & Learning
TypeAI OCR & Document ExtractionAI OCR & Document Extraction
Listed capabilities
  • 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
  • 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
Tagsdocling, ibm document ai, pdf parsing open source, document conversion, free ocrolmocr, open source ocr, pdf to text, allen institute, free ocr model
Websitegithub.comgithub.com
Full pageDocling details →olmOCR details →
AlternativesDocling alternatives →olmOCR alternatives →

dots.ocr (dots.mocr)

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freeNew
  • 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
freeNew
  • 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

MinerU

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freeNew
  • 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

PaddleOCR-VL

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freeNew
  • 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

DeepSeek-OCR

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freeNew
  • 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

Dolphin (ByteDance)

AI OCR & Document Extraction
freeNew
  • 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