# GLM-OCR

16 Hacker News commenters recommended GLM-OCR and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free 0.9 billion parameter OCR model that runs fast on laptops and CPUs with good results on complex documents. Caveat: connection timeouts on large PDFs.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast, small model with good speed (6 comments): "this looks really cool and, given I'm looking for OCR at the moment, I'm pretty interested" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982812)) "Perhaps the greatest benefit of GLM-OCR is speed: it's only a 0.9 billion parameter model" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372745)) "this is already a small and fast model when hosted via MLX on macOS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47627353))
- Runs locally on laptops and CPUs (4 comments): "It has good layout recognition quality, good text recognition quality, and they actually tested it on Apple Silicon laptops." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370066)) "GLM-OCR does much better than Claude, can be running on pretty miserly hardware locally, even laptops" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49577756)) "It's fast and can run even on low-resource devices." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663485))
- Good results on complex documents (2 comments): "It has good layout recognition quality, good text recognition quality, and they actually tested it on Apple Silicon laptops." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370066)) "I've had good results with glm-ocr on complex documents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48750605))
- Runs well in parallel across cores (2 comments): "I ran 20 instances of it in parallel to utilize 20 CPU cores so the avg time came down nicely." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980867)) "That's actually amazing, and might give me a way to use all the cores I have lying around." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042972))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Mistral OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mistral-ocr.md): 69 recommend
- [PaddleOCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paddleocr.md): 19 recommend
- [DeepSeek-OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-ocr.md): 12 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, "GLM-OCR", https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-ocr/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).