Best OCR API for document extraction
For turning PDFs and images into structured text, Mistral OCR 3 is a strong, cheap default: it is the only dedicated OCR API with a published independent OmniDocBench score, with markdown output and good handwriting. Google, AWS and Azure are the mature enterprise choices (cheapest basic tier and the largest documents), while Reducto and LlamaParse target hard, messy documents. A light estimate from public benchmarks and pricing, June 2026.
DefaultMistral OCR 3prijsGoogle Document AI (Enterprise Document OCR)benchmark_scoreMistral OCR 3max_grootte_asyncAWS Textract (DetectDocumentText)
Provider offerings
| Offering | Price ($/1000 pages) | Score | Max pages | Capabilities |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral OCR 3Mistral AI | 2 | 79.75 | 1000 | tableshandwritingJSON |
| Google Document AI (Enterprise Document OCR)Google Cloud | 1.5 | — | 200 | tableshandwritingJSON |
| AWS Textract (DetectDocumentText)Amazon Web Services | 1.5 | — | 3000 | tableshandwritingJSON |
| Azure Document Intelligence (Read)Microsoft Azure | 1.5 | — | 2000 | tableshandwritingJSON |
| ReductoReducto | —* | — | — | tableshandwritingJSON |
| LlamaParseLlamaIndex (LlamaCloud) | 3* | — | — | tableshandwritingJSON |
* token-/credit-priced — the headline understates real per-unit cost, so it is excluded from the cheapest ranking.
Sources
- Mistral Pricing2026-06-22
- Introducing Mistral OCR 32026-06-22
- CodeSOTA — OmniDocBench Leaderboard2026-06-22
- OmniDocBench (CVPR 2025) — opendatalab2026-06-22
- Google Cloud Document AI Pricing2026-06-22
- AWS Textract Pricing2026-06-22
- Azure Document Intelligence Pricing2026-06-22
- Reducto Pricing2026-06-22
- LlamaParse / LlamaIndex Pricing2026-06-22