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The best AI tools for OCR and document parsing in 2026

Document parsers turn scans, PDFs and forms into text, tables and fields a program can use. Accuracy on tables and long files, price per page and whether documents can stay on your own servers decide the choice.

By Andrew Miller and Sheela · Updated Oct 26, 2026 · How we review

How we chose: each pick is a product, model or project we have reviewed that does this job according to our review of it, ranked by our rating out of 5. We take no affiliate commission.

Also ranked: the best AI developer platforms

  1. 1

    GitHub Repos: RAG & data

    Docling

    Docling is the open-source parser that gets tables right, and the one whose security releases you cannot afford to skip.

    Best for: Teams building self-hosted RAG over PDFs and Office documents with complex tables.

    Price: Free and open source under the MIT license.

    Read our Docling review
    4.5/5
  2. 2

    AI Models: OCR & documents

    PaddleOCR-VL-1.6

    Top-of-table document parsing in under a billion parameters, as long as you accept Baidu's toolchain.

    Best for: Teams extracting tables, formulas and text from varied single-page documents at scale.

    Price: Free under Apache 2.0. No first-party hosted price published.

    Read our PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 review
    4.4/5
  3. 3

    GitHub Repos: RAG & data

    Marker

    Marker turns hard PDFs into usable Markdown better than any other open pipeline its makers measured, though the weights licence puts a revenue ceiling on that freedom.

    Best for: RAG and data teams converting large volumes of complex or scanned PDFs on their own hardware.

    Price: Code free under Apache 2.0; weights free below $5M revenue and funding, commercial licence above. Hosted Datalab API: Convert $4 per 1,000 pages (fast or balanced); Team plan $400/month.

    Read our Marker review
    4.3/5
  4. 4

    AI Tools: Developer platforms

    Reducto

    Reducto is the parser to pay for when an extraction error costs more than the page, though most of its accuracy evidence still traces back to Reducto.

    Best for: Teams extracting fields from long financial, legal or medical documents where errors are expensive.

    Price: $150 free usage; Parse $10, Extract $20, Deep Extract $40, Edit $60 per 1,000 pages; batch 20% off Parse and Extract. Growth and Enterprise custom.

    Read our Reducto review
    4.3/5
  5. 5

    AI Tools: Developer platforms

    LlamaParse

    LlamaParse turns documents into clean text for RAG pipelines at a cheap, predictable price per page, as long as your files are allowed to visit someone else's cloud.

    Best for: Teams parsing large volumes of mixed PDFs for RAG who want low, predictable per-page costs.

    Price: Free 10K credits/month; Starter $50/month (40K credits); Pro $500/month (400K credits). $1.25 per 1,000 credits; parsing 1 to 45 credits per page by tier.

    Read our LlamaParse review
    4.2/5
  6. 6

    AI Tools: Developer platforms

    Mistral OCR

    Mistral OCR reads documents well in almost any language and tells you how sure it is, at a price that only makes sense once you switch on batch.

    Best for: Developers building document pipelines in many languages who need page locations and confidence scores, especially in Europe or on-premises.

    Price: $4 per 1,000 pages; $2 per 1,000 pages on the Batch API; $5 per 1,000 annotated pages. Self-hosted container for enterprise customers, price not published.

    Read our Mistral OCR review
    4.2/5
  7. 7

    AI Models: OCR & documents

    Unlimited-OCR

    Unlimited-OCR turns a whole contract into one model call, and every number behind that claim so far comes from Baidu.

    Best for: Teams digitising long, multi-page documents who want whole-document passes on their own GPUs.

    Price: Free under the MIT licence. Baidu AI Cloud's hosted API is free for a limited time (200 test pages for individuals, 1,000 for businesses); paid rates not published.

    Read our Unlimited-OCR review
    4.1/5
  8. 8

    AI Tools: Developer platforms

    Azure Document Intelligence

    For invoices, receipts and forms that look the same every time, Azure Document Intelligence is cheap, steady and runs offline, but it is the wrong tool for messy documents that need judgement.

    Best for: Teams processing high volumes of standard forms, invoices or IDs on Azure, or anyone who needs document extraction to run on-premises or offline.

    Price: Free tier 500 pages a month; Read $1.50 per 1,000 pages ($0.60 above 1 million a month); Layout and prebuilt $10; custom extraction $30; classifier $3; add-ons $6; commitment tiers from $190/month; disconnected containers from $8,640/year.

    Read our Azure Document Intelligence review
    4.0/5

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