PaddleOCR-VL
Shares rank 7 of 11 OCR models by recommenders
Free open model that people report good results with for document OCR, especially at a small model size.
Free open model that people report good results with for document OCR, especially at a small model size.
6 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong results at small model size
“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”
Comment from 24 Jun 2026 in “Unlimited OCR: One-Shot Long-Horizon Parsing” Good experiences reported by users
“I’ve had good experiences with MinerU and PaddleOCR-VL”
Comment from 14 Aug 2026 in “Mistral OCR 4.1” Others hear very good things
“I've also heard very good things about these”
Comment from 11 Feb 2026 in “GLM-OCR: Accurate × Fast × Comprehensive”
Other OCR models people recommend
The four most recommended other OCR models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral OCR | 69 | 40 | 63% | 12 | — | — |
| PaddleOCR | 19 | 4 | 83% | 8 | — | Approved |
| GLM-OCR | 16 | 4 | 80% | 7 | — | Approved |
| DeepSeek-OCR | 12 | 4 | 75% | 9 | — | Approved |
| PaddleOCR-VLThis page | 6 | 0 | 100% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
4 of the 6 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“for OCR there are much better suited models”
“I’ve had good experiences with MinerU and PaddleOCR-VL”
“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”
“I've also heard very good things about these”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.