Whats the best open source OCR for batch processing pdfs in 2026?

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA 11/02/26, 05:48 AM Tools

ocr pdf-processing open-source vlm batch-processing local-inference document-ai

Summary

A practitioner asks the community which open-source OCR stack is best for fully local batch processing of 20-25 page mixed-content PDFs, shortlisting tools like Docling, GLM-OCR, PaddleOCR-VL, OlmOCR 2, and MinerU while weighing VLMs against text-layer parsers for tables and scanned pages.

trying to settle on a fully local setup for batch processing pdfs. like each file is around 20-25 pages and mostly text, a few tables and now and then a page thats just a photo of paper the shortlist so far - docling (and the granite-docling model) - glm-ocr - paddleOcr-vl - olmocr 2 - mineru we considered llamaparse for this kind of stuff but the company now wants every file to stay on our own servers and their self hosted route is an enterprise conversation. liteparse from the same team runs local and is quick on the plain text pages but the markdown is rule based with tesseract as the fallback so merged cells and multi column pages dont always come back clean is a VLM overkill for mostly text pdfs or does it make more sense to send only the table and image pages to one and keep the rest on a text layer parser? textract and docuent AI are out anyway for the same reason for the vlm ones, do people feed a whole 25 page pdf in one go or split it into page batches first? splitting every file is the part id rather avoid Edit: Adding from the comments: unlimited-ocr-2, minicpm-ocr-1.0, surya-ocr-2.5, indra-ocr and xiaomi-ocr-0. mostly curious how these would perform on mixed 20-25 page files

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