# DeepSeek-OCR

12 Hacker News commenters recommended DeepSeek-OCR and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free open-weights OCR model praised for compressing text into fewer tokens and strong results in use. Critics say newer models now beat it.

## Why people recommend it

- Visual compression cuts token costs (3 comments): "DeepSeek-OCR proved 10x+ compression from visual embedding of text, which was a groundbreaking result." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777848)) "in theory this could cut costs pretty well for long contexts + there no tokenisation layer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50233587)) "images can be profoundly more token-efficient encodings of information than even CSVs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784624))
- Works well in practice (3 comments): "vLLM gave me enormous throughput improvements on big documents via continuous batching" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47627353)) "which btw is amazing from my experimentations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035155)) "Turns out it works really well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48780514))
- Steady stream of new ideas (3 comments): "Every major release from them has brought something really new to the field" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586396)) "I love that the entire goal is to push Deepseek OCR further" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644232)) "for their valuable models and ideas" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643958))

## What people warn about

- Outperformed by newer models (2 comments): "Deepseek OCR is no longer state of the art." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47034720)) "performed significantly worse" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421088))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Mistral OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mistral-ocr.md): 69 recommend
- [PaddleOCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paddleocr.md): 19 recommend
- [GLM-OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-ocr.md): 16 recommend
- [dots.ocr](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dots-ocr.md): 8 recommend
- [Unlimited OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/unlimited-ocr.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "DeepSeek-OCR", https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-ocr/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).