Docling vs PaddleOCR
Both are alternatives to AWS Textract. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as PaddleOCR vs Docling — same comparison, one verdict.
Docling
TOP PICKIBM's document converter. Layout-aware PDF to clean Markdown, MIT.
Docling parses PDFs, Office documents, images and HTML into a structured representation that preserves reading order, tables, figures and headings, then exports to Markdown or JSON. It uses purpose-trained layout and table models rather than heuristics, which is why it holds up on multi-column academic papers and financial statements where simpler extractors interleave columns into nonsense. It integrates directly with LlamaIndex and Haystack, is MIT licensed, and runs entirely locally including on CPU.
PaddleOCR
The strongest open OCR engine, and the best at non-Latin scripts.
PaddleOCR is a comprehensive OCR toolkit covering text detection, recognition, table extraction, layout analysis and key-value extraction, with support for around eighty languages. Its non-Latin script handling — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic — is clearly the best of the open options, and it ships lightweight mobile-scale models alongside the accurate server ones. Apache-2.0. If raw recognition accuracy on difficult scans is the constraint, this is the engine.
Side by side
| Docling | PaddleOCR | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 94 | 92 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Pricing | Free, MIT. Runs on your own hardware, CPU or GPU. | Free, Apache-2.0. |
Docling is Macrostack's recommended AWS Textract alternative, so it's our pick here.
Docling
Strengths
- +Layout-aware — preserves reading order, tables and structure
- +Outputs clean Markdown/JSON that drops into a RAG pipeline
- +Direct integrations with LlamaIndex and Haystack
- +MIT, fully local, no per-page cost
Trade-offs
- −Slower per page than cloud OCR on very large batches
- −Handwriting support is weak compared with Textract
- −No specialised invoice or receipt models
PaddleOCR
Strengths
- +Best-in-class open recognition accuracy on difficult scans
- +Around eighty languages, with excellent non-Latin coverage
- +Includes table, layout and key-value extraction
- +Lightweight models for edge and mobile deployment
Trade-offs
- −Built on the PaddlePaddle framework — an extra dependency to adopt
- −Documentation is stronger in Chinese than in English
- −Output needs more post-processing than Docling's Markdown
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Facts verified 2026-08-11. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.