LlamaParse vs PaddleOCR
Which platform delivers better document parsing?
PaddleOCR is a popular OSS tool that provides basic document understanding for simple documents at low document volumes. LlamaParse provides production-ready agentic OCR: fast, accurate, and scalable document ingestion, used by millions of developers with LlamaIndex and other AI agent ecosystems.
Why LlamaParse
Why choose LlamaParse over PaddleOCR?
Accuracy you can trust
LlamaParse handles complex, real-world documents with ease, messy layouts, split tables, scans, charts, and embedded images. Its agentic OCR adapts to new document types without retraining, while PaddleOCR provides basic document understanding that struggles with complex layouts and requires significant infrastructure engineering to run at production-scale.
Scalable document pipelines
LlamaParse is built to scale to billions of documents in production settings. It offers multiple parsing tiers to balance cost, accuracy, and latency, and provides auto-routing to help ensure cost efficiency in scalable document processing pipelines. While PaddleOCR is open-source, it typically requires costly engineering investment to prepare for production scale and does not provide the accuracy and scalability needed in production settings.
End-to-end agentic automation
LlamaParse integrates seamlessly with LlamaIndex or other agent ecosystems, easing the process of agent engineering and end-to-end workflow automation. LlamaIndex is trusted by millions of developers for building end-to-end automation agents and widely trusted by leading AI builders. PaddleOCR requires custom connections and code to integrate with other AI tools, requiring significant engineering effort in building and maintaining custom or open source code.
Comparison
LlamaParse vs PaddleOCR: high-level comparison
Features | LlamaIndex | PaddleOCR |
|---|---|---|
| Parse | ||
| Basic OCR |
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| Chart parsing |
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| Table parsing |
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| Bounding boxes |
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| Semantic reading order detection |
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| # 1 accuracy Agentic OCR |
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| Cost-efficient tier |
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| Auto-cost optimizer |
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| Zero data retraining |
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| 90+ supported file types |
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| Integration with latest VLMs |
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| Auto-scaling managed infrastructure |
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| Extract | ||
| Schema-based extraction |
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| Auto-schema detection |
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| Page-level extraction |
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| Table-row level extraction |
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| Citations with confidence scores |
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| Index | ||
| Intelligent Chunking |
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| Integrations with Data + AI stack |
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| LlamaAgents | ||
| Dedicated orchestration layer |
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| Trusted by millions for agent building |
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| Text-to-code agent builder |
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| Single click workflow deployment |
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How it works
We built agentic OCR so you don't have to.
Complex layouts read with human-level precision and rebuilt into clean LLM-ready outputs through semantic understanding, not legacy object detection models.
Coordinated team of specialist agents break down complex document elements and route to the best suited expert.
Recursive checks that detect and fix errors automatically, delivering high pass-through rates even on messy scans and multi-modal documents.
Enterprise
From security to scale, LlamaParse is built for document AI
Dedicated Platform Support
LlamaParse provides dedicated support at every usage tier. Signing up for LlamaParse is free with 10k free credits and goes from community support at it’s free tier without thousands of developers to a dedicated account manager and support engineer at the enterprise tier.
Deploy anywhere
Run LlamaParse in your cloud or in its secure SaaS. No data leaves your environment and strictly no retraining on customer data. Ideal for strict compliance, sensitive data, regulated industries, and organizations with stringent residency requirements.
Proven reliability
LlamaParse is trusted by the world’s most consequential enterprises such as KPMG, BP, EY, Pepsi, and more. It is also used by the world’s largest startups like Lovable, Tabs and more for document ingestion at scale.
Security and compliance ready
Enterprise-grade security with RBAC, audit logs, encryption in transit and at rest, and governance controls. The platform is SOC2 Type2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant out-of-the-box and meets stringent privacy requirements for the secure handling of sensitive document data.
