StackMap
Subscribe

olmocr alternatives

Curated alternatives to olmocr — and why you'd switch.

MinerU

Heavyweight document-to-markdown/JSON parser — PDFs plus Office (docx/pptx/xlsx) through layout analysis and OCR into LLM-ready output for RAG and agentic pipelines. 73k stars, self-hostable.

Why switchSame job — self-hosted document→markdown for LLM ingestion: olmocr is a focused VLM PDF-linearizer; MinerU is the broader pipeline (PDF + Office, layout analysis) with far more traction.
Full comparison →
Unlimited-OCR

Baidu's open OCR VLM that parses entire multi-page documents in one shot — 'unlimited' long-horizon parsing pushing DeepSeek-OCR further. MIT weights on HF; serve via transformers, vLLM or SGLang.

Why switchSame job — self-hosted VLM that linearizes messy PDFs into LLM-ready text: olmocr is AllenAI's page-pipeline toolkit built for training-data ingestion; Unlimited-OCR bets on one-shot long-horizon parsing that preserves cross-page structure.
Full comparison →
chandra

Datalab's SOTA open OCR model: images/PDFs to structured HTML/Markdown/JSON with layout, tables, forms, checkboxes, handwriting and math, in 90+ languages. Local HF or vLLM inference.

Why switchHead-to-head open OCR-VLM rivals on the same benchmark (Chandra 2 scores 85.8 vs olmOCR 2's 82.4). olmOCR is fully permissive and tuned for LLM-training-data linearization; Chandra leads on handwriting/forms/multilingual but carries an OpenRAIL-M weights license.
Full comparison →
xberg

Rust-core document-intelligence engine with 15 language bindings: turns 96 formats — PDF, Office, images, audio, code — into clean text, tables and RAG-ready chunks. Library, CLI, REST or MCP.

Why switchSame end goal — clean, ordered Markdown from PDFs for RAG/training ingestion. olmocr is a dedicated self-hosted vision-language model that excels on scans, tables and handwriting; Xberg is a general extraction framework where OCR is one pluggable backend. Use olmocr when OCR quality is the bottleneck, Xberg when you need many formats and language bindings.
Full comparison →
chunkr

Document intelligence API in Rust: layout analysis, OCR with bounding boxes, and semantic chunking that turn PDFs, PPTs and Word docs into RAG-ready structured chunks.

Why switchBoth parse hard documents for AI consumption; olmocr bets on a VLM end-to-end, Chunkr on a layout-analysis pipeline with structured outputs and citations.
Full comparison →