Documents and OCR

LightOnOCR

A French 1B OCR model that converts a page into text in one pass and is fast on high volumes. Languages on the card: European languages, Chinese and Japanese; no Russian.

Developer
LightOn, France
First release
Oct 2025
Latest release
Jan 2026
Sizes
0.9B – 1B
License
Commercial use allowedApache 2.0
Russian
Not supported
Ready-made builds
GGUF
Running
On your own serverAlso runs without a GPU
Industries
Documents and accounting
Deploy on your server Hugging Face

What it does

  • Recognising invoices and contracts in European languages
  • Table recognition
  • Converting PDFs to text for search and RAG
  • Locating element coordinates on a page (bbox versions)

Where it is used

Document workflowLegal departmentsArchives

Hardware requirements

LaptopLaptop or regular PC, up to 8 GB of VRAM — smaller versions
fits
1 GPUOne GPU with 16–80 GB — mid-size versions
no versions
ClusterServer with several GPUs — flagship versions
no versions

Versions

  1. LightOnOCR-2-1B и bbox-версии
  2. LightOnOCR-1B-1025

How to run it

On your own serverWeights are downloaded from Hugging Face and served with vLLM (load and API) or llama.cpp (modest hardware). The model then runs in a closed network with no per-request fees.Hugging Face
How much hardware you needCalculate the VRAM for the model size, context length and number of concurrent requests.Open the hardware calculator

I can set this up end to end: pick the model size, deploy it on your server and connect it to your systems. Quantization compresses a model so it takes less video memory and runs on more modest hardware. Answers change slightly, so quality is checked on your own examples.

Frequently asked questions

Can LightOnOCR be used in a commercial project?

Yes. License: Apache 2.0. It allows commercial use, but it is still worth having a lawyer review the license before launch.

What hardware does LightOnOCR need?

At minimum: Laptop or regular PC, up to 8 GB of VRAM — smaller versions. Some versions also run on an ordinary CPU, without a GPU. You can calculate the exact VRAM for your model size and context in the hardware calculator.

Does LightOnOCR support Russian?

No. The model card lists its languages and Russian is not among them.

Where can I download LightOnOCR and what does it cost?

The LightOnOCR weights are open and free to download. You only pay for the hardware it runs on and for the setup. Source links are at the bottom of this page.

How I deploy it for clients

  1. SelectionI pick the model size for your task and hardware and test it on your examples.
  2. DeploymentI deploy it on your server or in a closed network and provide an API.
  3. Fine-tuningI fine-tune it on your data (LoRA) or connect a knowledge base — whichever is cheaper for the task.
  4. IntegrationI connect it to your CRM, ERP, bot, website or team chat and set up monitoring.

Similar models

Documents and OCRGLM-OCRZhipu AI (Z.ai) · ChinaCommercial use allowed

A lightweight OCR model from Zhipu for document parsing. The model card lists Russian among supported languages; built for high load and low-end hardware.

DetailsDocuments and OCRPaddleOCR-VLBaidu (PaddlePaddle) · ChinaCommercial use allowed

A compact document parsing model from the popular PaddleOCR toolkit. Per the model card it supports 109 languages, including Russian; version 1.6 leads the OmniDocBench benchmark.

DetailsDocuments and OCRSmolDocling и Granite-DoclingIBM and Hugging Face · USACommercial use allowed

Tiny models for the open Docling document converter: they turn a page into markup with tables, formulas and code. Run on an ordinary laptop.

Details

Source: huggingface.co/lightonai/LightOnOCR-2-1B. Data checked against the model card on 22 Sep 2026. Have a lawyer review the license before commercial launch.