A user from AskThisGuy.com reported that Mistral OCR is the best-performing solution they tested but is expensive at $2-$4 per 1,000 pages and is not open source.

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  "detected_at": "2026-09-22T03:45:45+00:00",
  "company": {
    "name": "Mistral AI",
    "domain": "mistral.ai"
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    "post_id": "1wmyoiz",
    "summary": "A user from AskThisGuy.com reported that Mistral OCR is the best-performing solution they tested but is expensive at $2-$4 per 1,000 pages and is not open source.",
    "category": "pricing",
    "comments": [
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Rag/comments/1wmyoiz/comment/pbdmt3x/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 2,
        "author": "polandtown",
        "excerpt": "in my usecase mini-cpm-4 outperformed textract, only negative was, trust remote code = True in it's config. Customer didn't like that.",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-22T15:04:21.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/polandtown/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Rag/comments/1wmyoiz/comment/pbnf0o1/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 2,
        "author": "vlm-run",
        "excerpt": "pp-ocrv6 is hands down the best replacement to AWS Textract if you're looking for true bounding boxes, and not markdown.\n\n PaddleOCR-VL, dots.mocr, GLM-OCR have a lot of variability in their outputs based on the domain, so I'd always recommend trying them out on your own data first.\n\n If you're interested in quick way to test (with free usage, in the anonymous tier), try:\n\nuvx vlmrun gw chat -m pa",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-23T21:36:58.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/vlm-run/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Rag/comments/1wmyoiz/comment/pbp53jz/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 1,
        "author": "Green-Topic-1024",
        "excerpt": "Side note since people are comparing models: the annoying part was never picking one of the options, it was running them side by side. I had four vLLM servers up at one point and the GPU was idle maybe 80% of the time while I stared at markdown diffs.\n\n Moved them behind SIE (Superlinked Inference Engine) for the last round (open source, full disclosure I follow the project). One endpoint, swap th",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-24T03:18:06.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/Green-Topic-1024/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Rag/comments/1wmyoiz/comment/pbbl2ik/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 1,
        "author": "GnarlyBear",
        "excerpt": "What are you scanning, just PDFs of reports etc? I was working for a long time on had filled worksheets and the LLM based ones were the best",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-22T07:16:34.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/GnarlyBear/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Rag/comments/1wmyoiz/comment/pbeap67/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 1,
        "author": "Thick-Boat4896",
        "excerpt": "Have a look at LightonOCR, results on PDF, scans and handwriting was pretty good for me: https://lighton.ai/lighton-blogs/making-knowledge-machine-readable",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-22T16:46:00.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/Thick-Boat4896/"
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      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Rag/comments/1wmyoiz/comment/pbj3lkn/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 1,
        "author": "jc-atg",
        "excerpt": "Hi, at www.askthisguy.com we tested Mistral OCR, PaddleOCR and LightOnOCR for many documents ; compared it with parsers like Docling, Markitdown, etc.\n\n From our experience, Mistral OCR (not open source) is the best solution, but expensive ($2-$4/1k pages). PaddleOCR is almost as good, LightOnOCR was far behind in our testings (in most cases, Docling was better).\n\n Generally speaking, do not trust",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-23T08:56:56.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/jc-atg/"
      },
      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Rag/comments/1wmyoiz/comment/pbc30ue/",
        "depth": 0,
        "score": 1,
        "author": "Anu_Rag9704",
        "excerpt": "There’s a new one by alibaba i guess?",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-22T09:53:32.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/Anu_Rag9704/"
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      {
        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Rag/comments/1wmyoiz/comment/pbc8not/",
        "depth": 0,
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        "author": "ephocalate",
        "excerpt": "but mineru isnt an ocr right? If I read the docs correctly they are using PP-OCRv6 which is paddleOCR",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-22T10:37:16.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/ephocalate/"
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    "evidence": [
      "[comment u/jc-atg] From our experience, Mistral OCR (not open source) is the best solution, but expensive ($2-$4/1k pages). PaddleOCR is almost as good, LightOnOCR was far behind in our testings (in most cases, Docling was better)."
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    "post_date": "2026-09-22T03:45:45.000Z",
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    "post_text": "Been testing self-hosted OCR to get off Textract, since the managed services sit around $1.50 per 1,000 pages and jump hard once forms and tables are involved. The main lesson is there's no single winner, it comes down to your document type.\n\nWhat I tried:\n\ndocling: turns digital PDFs into clean markdown, great for RAG ingestion, shaky on scans and handwriting\n\nPaddleOCR-VL: multilingual VLM, 94.5% on OmniDocBench v1.5, small at ~0.9B so it fits a modest GPU\n\nMinerU: best of the bunch on formula-heavy scientific PDFs\n\nGLM-OCR: solid general image-to-markdown, good baseline to measure the rest against\n\nTwo things that caught me out: the top scores are close enough that testing on your own documents matters more than the leaderboard, and licenses bite, since Surya needs a commercial license past a revenue threshold and a couple of the leaders are CC-BY-NC.\n\nIf you'd rather not run a separate server per model, some inference servers like SIE let you swap OCR models behind one endpoint, but that's optional.",
    "sentiment": "mixed",
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    "post_title": "Best open source OCR models to replace Textract (tested a bunch)",
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    "source_url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Rag/comments/1wmyoiz/best_open_source_ocr_models_to_replace_textract/",
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    "total_upvotes": 32,
    "comments_total": 22,
    "total_comments": 22,
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        "name": "PaddleOCR",
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        "name": "Lighton",
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