Best OCR APIs for Each Job

Find the OCR and document extraction APIs that fit your job, whether that is Markdown for a language model, a filled schema, handwriting, Office files, long documents, or self-hosting. Each reason comes from the vendor's own documentation.

A developer adding document reading to a product usually starts with one kind of document and one place the output has to land. The output shape settles most of the choice, whether that is Markdown for a language model or typed fields for a database. The languages on the page, the file types, the document length, and where the service may run decide the rest.

Rates and claims last checked October 2026

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Which API fits which job

Which API fits which job
Job	Where it fits
PDF to Markdown for LLMs and RAG	Mistral OCRMistral OCR returns each page as Markdown, with tables inline or as separate Markdown or HTML, and extracts the page's images beside the text. LlamaParseParse returns each page as Markdown with headings and tables on every tier except Fast, which returns text without Markdown. Paxa LabsPaxa OCR Lite returns each page as GitHub-flavored Markdown in reading order, with headings, lists, and tables, or as typed blocks of the same reading.
Filling a schema you write	Mistral OCRAnnotations fill a Pydantic, Zod, or JSON schema for the whole document or for each image region, with nested objects, arrays, and enums. LlamaParseExtract fills a JSON schema of up to 5,000 properties as a job you poll, and can attach citations and a confidence score to each field. Paxa LabsPaxa Document Extraction fills a typed schema of up to 100 leaf fields in one response, and each value is printed text or null with the reason.
Thai identity documents, invoices, and forms	Azure Document IntelligenceRead and Layout list Thai for printed text and handwriting, and the prebuilt invoice and receipt models list Thai among their languages. Paxa LabsPaxa Document Extraction has built-in types for 13-digit Thai identifiers verified by check digit, provinces, banks, insurers, legal forms, and dates in either era.
Handwriting	Amazon TextractAmazon Textract reads handwriting in English documents and puts a confidence score from 0 to 100 on each result. Azure Document IntelligenceThe v4.0 Read and Layout models read handwriting in a list of languages that includes Thai, and the language code is optional.
Office files	Azure Document IntelligenceRead and Layout accept DOCX, PPTX, and XLS files beside PDFs and images. Mistral OCRMistral OCR accepts PPTX and DOCX documents beside PDFs and images, and returns their pages as Markdown. LlamaParseParse reads more than 130 file types and returns each as Markdown, text, or JSON.
Very large documents	Amazon TextractAsynchronous jobs read files of up to 3,000 pages from an S3 bucket. Azure Document IntelligenceThe Standard tier analyzes documents of up to 2,000 pages and 500 MB. LlamaParseParse takes files of up to 512 MB and sets no page cap.
Running on your own infrastructure	Azure Document IntelligenceRead, Layout, and the invoice, receipt, and ID document models run as Docker containers on premises. Mistral OCRMistral's OCR 4 announcement describes a single-container deployment for self-hosting, available to enterprise customers. LlamaParseIts self-hosting guide runs Parse and Extract on your own Kubernetes cluster through Helm charts, on Enterprise plans.

How this guide is built

The vendors are those with a comparison page on this site, beside Paxa OCR Lite and Paxa Document Extraction, which appear only under jobs their documentation supports. Each reason restates the vendor's own documentation, linked beside it. Rates are published list prices per 1,000 pages, re-checked every month. This page gives no scores and no rank.

Published rates

Published rates
Provider	Reading, per 1,000 pages	Field extraction, per 1,000 pages
Paxa LabsPaxa OCR Lite · Paxa Document Extraction	$6.50	$13
LlamaParse	$1.25-56	$10-75
Amazon Textract	$1.50-4.00	$15-70
Azure Document Intelligence	$1.50-10	$10-30
Mistral OCR	$2-4	$3-5

Every rate is per 1,000 pages at the vendor's first pay-as-you-go volume band. Field extraction is compared with ours for a schema of up to 50 fields. A larger schema costs $20 per 1,000 pages.

Questions

Which OCR API is best?

It depends on the job. Find the job above that matches your documents and your output, then run your own files through the APIs it names.

What is the difference between OCR and document extraction?

OCR returns the text of each page, as Markdown or as structured blocks. Document extraction fills named fields, such as an invoice number or a date, from the same file. Paxa OCR Lite does the first and Paxa Document Extraction the second.

Can one pipeline use more than one of these APIs?

Yes. Route each document by its job, for example slide decks to one API and scanned Thai forms to another. Your code then reads one response shape per API.

Do you publish accuracy comparisons?

No. We publish no accuracy, quality, or speed figures for any model. Run the same documents through each API you are considering and compare the output.

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