PaddleOCR-VL or DeepSeek-OCR: which to choose for business
Both allow commercial use and convert scans to Markdown. PaddleOCR-VL is smaller (0.9B), Apache 2.0, supports 109 languages including Russian per its card, recognizes tables, formulas and stamps, and runs on a regular PC without a powerful GPU; the catalog notes that version 1.6 leads the OmniDocBench test. DeepSeek-OCR (about 3B, MIT and Apache 2.0) compresses a page into a small number of visual tokens and targets bulk processing, and it is in Ollama; Russian support is not confirmed in its card and CPU use is not marked. PaddleOCR-VL was updated more recently (2026-05 vs 2026-01).
Comparison based on catalog data
| Parameter | PaddleOCR-VL | DeepSeek-OCR |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Documents and OCR | Documents and OCR |
| Developer | Baidu (PaddlePaddle), China | DeepSeek, China |
| Releases | Oct 2025 – May 2026 | Oct 2025 – Jan 2026 |
| Sizes | 0.9B | about 3B |
| Hardware | Laptop | Laptop, 1 GPU |
| Commercial use | Commercial use allowed | Commercial use allowed |
| License | Apache 2.0 | DeepSeek-OCR: MIT; DeepSeek-OCR 2: Apache 2.0 |
| Russian | Supported | Not stated |
| Ollama | No | Yes |
| Without GPU | Yes | No |
| Tasks |
|
|
Choose PaddleOCR-VL if
- Your documents are in Russian: invoices, contracts, waybills
- You need to recognize stamps, formulas and tables
- You have no GPU: the model runs on a regular PC
Choose DeepSeek-OCR if
- You process a large archive of scans in bulk
- You convert PDFs to Markdown for search and RAG
- You want to run it through Ollama
Other comparisons
- GOT-OCR 2.0 or PaddleOCR-VL: choosing an OCR model
- dots.ocr or DeepSeek-OCR: which parses documents better for you
- Qwen-VL or InternVL: which vision model to choose
- MiniCPM-V or Qwen-VL: which to choose for image recognition
- Qwen or GigaChat: which to choose for business
- Qwen or Llama: which to choose for business
- GigaChat or YandexGPT: which to choose for business
- DeepSeek or Qwen: which to choose for business
- Gemma or Llama: which to choose for business
- Mistral or Llama: which to choose for business
- Whisper or GigaAM: which to choose for business
- Whisper or Parakeet: which to choose for business
Need a model for your task?
An open model can run on your own server: data stays in-house, there is no per-request fee, and the model can be fine-tuned on your documents.
- SelectThe model and size for your task and hardware budget
- DeployOn your server or in a closed network, with an API
- Fine-tuneOn your data, or connect a knowledge base
- IntegrateInto your CRM, ERP, bot, website or team chat