Document parsing is the category where I get the most “which one should I pick” emails, and it is almost always the same two names: LlamaParse and Reducto. On the surface they look close. Through our router, LlamaParse costs $1.50 per thousand pages and Reducto costs $1.80 (that is provider list plus our 20%, so $1.25 and $1.50 direct). Thirty cents per thousand pages. Barely a decision.
Except that sticker comparison is misleading, because the two products are built on opposite philosophies. LlamaParse is a budget floor with an expensive escalator. Reducto is one tier, priced like it knows what it is.
The sticker prices
| Provider | Routed price (per 1k pages) | Quality score |
|---|---|---|
| LlamaParse | $1.50 | 75 |
| Reducto | $1.80 | 92 |
| Mistral OCR | $2.40 | 78 |
I included Mistral OCR for context, since it is the third parser in our catalog, but the interesting fight is between the other two. Quality scores are our hand-curated 0-100 ratings, published in the open-source catalog with the methodology at /docs/quality.
LlamaParse: cheap base mode, a 15x premium tier
LlamaParse’s base pricing is the cheapest way to parse a page in our catalog. For clean, digitally native PDFs, that price buys you perfectly serviceable markdown output, and if that is your whole corpus, you can stop reading and go use it.
The catch is premium mode. When a document is ugly (dense tables, scans, complex layouts), LlamaParse’s premium processing consumes roughly 15x the units of base mode. Do the multiplication and the effective price lands around $22.50 per thousand pages routed. That is not 20% cheaper than Reducto. It is roughly 12x more expensive.
So the real question is not “which parser is cheaper.” It is “what fraction of my pages will need premium treatment.” Here is the blended math, assuming base mode at $1.50 and premium at roughly $22.50 per 1k:
| Premium share of pages | Blended cost per 1k pages | vs Reducto ($1.80) |
|---|---|---|
| 0% | $1.50 | LlamaParse wins |
| 1.4% | ~$1.80 | Break-even |
| 5% | ~$2.55 | Reducto wins |
| 10% | ~$3.60 | Reducto wins, 2x |
The break-even is startlingly low. If more than about one or two pages in a hundred need the premium tier, the “cheap” option is no longer cheap. And in my experience, people consistently underestimate how much of their corpus is ugly, because the ugly documents are exactly the ones nobody opened before building the pipeline.
Reducto: one tier, the highest score in the category
Reducto’s pitch is consistency. There is no mode decision to make per document, no escalator to fall onto. Every page costs the same $1.80 routed, and the quality score of 92 is the highest in our parse catalog. Tables, multi-column layouts, and scanned material are the cases where a score gap of 17 points shows up in practice, and those are exactly the documents that would have pushed you into LlamaParse’s premium tier anyway.
The structural argument for Reducto is that it removes a classification problem from your pipeline. With LlamaParse, doing it right means predicting per document whether base mode will be good enough. If you guess wrong one way you pay 15x; if you guess wrong the other way you feed garbage markdown into your RAG index and find out weeks later, when retrieval quality mysteriously degrades. I wrote more about that failure mode in the document parsing for RAG roundup.
Which parser for which document mix
My honest routing advice, having sent traffic to both:
- Uniform, digitally native PDFs at high volume (invoices from one template, exported reports, generated docs): LlamaParse base mode. This is its home turf and nothing in the catalog beats the price.
- Mixed or unpredictable corpora (user uploads, contracts, anything scanned): Reducto. The blended math above almost always favors it once premium share creeps past a couple of percent, and you skip the classification headache entirely.
- You can reliably pre-classify: run both. Route the clean stream to LlamaParse and the ugly stream to Reducto. This is the cheapest correct configuration, but only if your classifier is actually reliable.
How I route it
On route.tools, cheapest-first routing sends parse traffic to LlamaParse and fails over automatically if a provider errors (the router tries up to three providers per request). Setting routing: { "sort": "quality" } flips the order and sends pages to Reducto first. Saved routing preferences mean you can switch a whole pipeline from one to the other without a code change, which is handy when the corpus mix shifts under you.
Neither answer is wrong. LlamaParse is the right floor, Reducto is the right default, and the 15x escalator is the number that should drive the decision.
Full pricing for all three parsers, generated from the same open catalog our router reads, is on the document parsing comparison page.