People search for “OCR API” and vendors sell “document parsing,” and the two camps are describing the same shelf. If you have PDFs and you want machine-readable text out of them, the modern options are the document parsing APIs, and they do a lot more than classic OCR ever did: layout reconstruction, table extraction, reading-order logic, markdown output that a language model can actually use.
I route parsing traffic across three providers, so I pay all three bills. Here is the category as an OCR buyer should see it in 2026.
First, what “OCR” means now
Classic OCR answered one question: what characters are on this page? That is table stakes now. The hard problems in PDF extraction are structural. A two-column academic paper read in the wrong order is garbage for RAG. A financial table flattened into a paragraph loses the relationships that made it worth extracting. A scanned invoice with a stamp over the total needs judgment, not just character recognition.
The three providers below all handle digital and scanned PDFs, and they all output structured text. What you are choosing between is how well they handle the hard 10% of pages, and how much you pay for the easy 90%.
The contenders
Routed prices from our catalog (provider list plus 20%; side-by-side detail on the document parsing comparison page):
| Provider | Routed per 1k pages | Quality score | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| LlamaParse | $1.50 | 75 | Premium mode costs ~15x the units |
| Reducto | $1.80 | 92 | Consistent quality, one tier |
| Mistral OCR | $2.40 | 78 | The most literally “OCR” of the three |
1. Reducto: the quality pick
Reducto scores 92 in our catalog, the highest in the category, and the score reflects what I see in routed traffic: it is the provider I trust most on the documents that break other parsers. Complex layouts, dense tables, forms with weird geometry. At $1.80 per 1k pages routed it is not the cheapest, but the pricing is refreshingly one-dimensional: there is no premium tier to reason about, no mode selection per document. You send pages, you get consistently good output. For pipelines where a silently mangled table becomes a wrong answer three steps later (most RAG pipelines, in other words), consistency is worth real money.
2. LlamaParse: the budget pick with an asterisk
LlamaParse’s base mode is the price floor at $1.50 per 1k pages routed, and for clean digital PDFs it is a perfectly reasonable default. The asterisk is the premium mode, which consumes roughly 15x the units. That is not a rounding error; it means a document mix that quietly needs premium treatment can cost you multiples of Reducto’s flat price. If your corpus is mostly straightforward and you can afford a quality score of 75 on the long tail, LlamaParse base mode is the cheapest path through the category. If you find yourself reaching for premium mode on more than a small fraction of pages, redo the math. I did a longer head-to-head in LlamaParse vs Reducto.
3. Mistral OCR: the model-native option
Mistral OCR is the newest of the three in our rotation and, true to its name, the most focused on the recognition problem itself. At $2.40 per 1k pages routed with a quality score of 78, it is priced above both competitors, which makes it a situational pick rather than a default. Where it earns a slot is diversity: it fails differently than the other two, which is exactly what you want in the third position of a failover chain. When a document defeats one parser, a structurally different parser is more likely to succeed than a retry.
The caveats nobody puts on the pricing page
Handwriting. All three providers are dramatically better at print than handwriting. If your corpus is handwritten forms or notes, run a real pilot on your actual documents before believing any quality score, including ours.
Tables are the differentiator. In my experience, table extraction quality is where the score gap between Reducto and the budget tier shows up most visibly. If your PDFs are table-heavy (financials, lab reports, logistics docs), weight quality over price.
Page counts are sneaky. Per-page billing sounds simple until you meet a 400-page appendix your agent only needed 3 pages of. Split documents before parsing when you can.
Scanned quality floors everything. A 150 DPI fax-of-a-photocopy will produce mediocre output from every provider on this list. Garbage in still applies.
How I would route it
For a RAG ingestion pipeline (the most common use case, covered in document parsing APIs for RAG): LlamaParse base mode first for cost, Reducto as the quality failover, Mistral OCR third for diversity. For anything where extraction errors are expensive, invert it and start with Reducto; the 30 cent per 1k page premium over LlamaParse is nothing against the cost of debugging silent corruption. That is roughly how cheapest-first and quality-first routing behave on route.tools, and either preference is a config change rather than a code change.
Current pricing for all three, generated from the same open catalog our router reads, is on the document parsing comparison page.