Pyyan / Compare / PaddleOCR vs GLM-OCR vs Qwen3-VL
PaddleOCR vs GLM-OCR vs Qwen3-VL
3 of 5OCR & Document AI · verified 13 Aug 2026
| Specification | PaddleOCR | GLM-OCR | Qwen3-VL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summary | The classical workhorse, still widely deployed. | Currently the top scorer on document parsing. | A general vision model that happens to lead OCR benchmarks. |
| OmniDocBench | ~82 | 94.6 | ~93 |
| Open weights | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Handles | Text, tables, receipts | Tables, formulas, handwriting | Documents, charts, video |
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Open weights | Apache 2.0 |
| Kind | Classical engine | Vision language model | Vision language model |
| Category | OCR & Document AI | OCR & Document AI | OCR & Document AI |
| Official | Baidu ↗ | Zhipu AI ↗ | Alibaba ↗ |
Highlighted rows are where these differ.
PaddleOCR
- Runs on CPU and mobile
- Predates the VLM approach and still ships in production
Best for on-device and offline recognition.
GLM-OCR
- Ahead of Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2 on the same benchmark
- 94.0 on OCRBench
Best for complex documents end to end.
Qwen3-VL
- Not an OCR model, and beats most of them
- Sizes from 2B to 235B
Best for one model for vision and documents.