Pick olmOCR if
researchers who will clone olmOCR or poke the demo.
Read the olmOCR pageolmOCR vs PaddleOCR
Our take
Pick olmOCR if you're researchers who will clone olmOCR or poke the demo. Pick PaddleOCR if you're an engineer who will run Apache PaddleOCR or poke the Space. Skip olmOCR if you're on a aP team who need Forms $50 / 1k (AWS Textract). Skip PaddleOCR if you're on a team that need a public $/1k SLA (Mistral OCR) without a GPU.
Best for
olmOCR Academic/technical PDFs you can self-host
PaddleOCR Local or demo OCR you can self-host
Free plan
olmOCR $0 · apache-2.0. You pay GPU
PaddleOCR $0 · apache-2.0. You pay hardware
Lowest paid
olmOCR Not published by the vendor
PaddleOCR Not published by the vendor
Runs where
olmOCR Local or hosted
PaddleOCR Local or hosted
Watch out
olmOCR You bring the GPU
PaddleOCR The Space can be slow
Last checked
olmOCR 2026-10-28 · github.com/allenai/olmocr
PaddleOCR 2026-10-28 · github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR
Which one, then?
Pick PaddleOCR if
engineers who will run Apache PaddleOCR or poke the Space.
Read the PaddleOCR page