The best OCR and document AI models in 2026

The best OCR and document AI models right now are PaddleOCR-VL-1.6, Mistral OCR 4.1 and Unlimited-OCR 2, out of 5 we have reviewed. Each is ranked by our rating, with its price, our verdict and who it suits.

By Andrew Miller · Updated Oct 31, 2026 · How we review

How we ranked: by our rating out of 5, from reviews built on each product's own pricing, documentation and policies plus independent benchmarks where they exist, each checked on the date shown in the review. We take no affiliate commission.

1. 1
   P

   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
2. 2
   M

   Mistral OCR 4.1

   Strong, layout-aware OCR with useful confidence scores and a self-hosting option, at four times the price of its predecessor and of some rivals.

   Best for: Teams building document pipelines that need layout, confidence scores and EU or on-premises hosting more than the lowest cost per page.

   Price: $4 per 1,000 pages; $2 per 1,000 pages on the Batch API; Document AI annotations $5 per 1,000 pages. Self-hosted container for enterprise customers by arrangement.

   Read our Mistral OCR 4.1 review
   4.2/5
3. 3
   U

   Unlimited-OCR 2

   Unlimited-OCR 2 turns a 300-page report into a single model call, and so far the only scoreboard that proves it is one Baidu built.

   Best for: Teams digitising long reports, contracts and books 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 2 review
   4.2/5
4. 4
   S

   Surya OCR 2.5

   Surya 2.5 makes a sub-1B model a credible full document parser at about 16,000 pages an hour on one H100, but its weights licence is the one to read first.

   Best for: Small teams and researchers who need fast self-hosted document parsing with layout and tables, and whose company sits under the licence threshold.

   Price: Weights free for research, personal use and companies under $5M revenue and funding; paid licence above that (price not published). Datalab API: Convert $4 per 1,000 pages fast/balanced, $10 accurate; Team plan $400/month.

   Read our Surya OCR 2.5 review
   4.0/5
5. 5
   D

   DeepSeek-OCR 2

   Frugal with visual tokens and well documented in its paper, but its rivals read better and its own repository stopped moving in February.

   Best for: Teams already invested in the DeepSeek-OCR stack who want a drop-in accuracy upgrade.

   Price: Free under Apache 2.0.

   Read our DeepSeek-OCR 2 review
   3.7/5