# PaddleOCR-VL

6 Hacker News commenters recommended PaddleOCR-VL and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free open model that people report good results with for document OCR, especially at a small model size.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong results at small model size (1 comments): "Paddle-VL and GLM-OCR do this by using PP-DocLayoutv3 as their "detector/slicer" and then just batch the OCR on the clips to do pretty darn well at a tiny size" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48654714))
- Good experiences reported by users (1 comments): "I’ve had good experiences with MinerU and PaddleOCR-VL" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49298968))
- Others hear very good things (1 comments): "I've also heard very good things about these" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976224))

## 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
- [DeepSeek-OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-ocr.md): 12 recommend
- [dots.ocr](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dots-ocr.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "PaddleOCR-VL", https://hackerapproved.com/p/paddleocr-vl/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).