Best OCR APIs by Latency, 2026
Reducto leads 6 document parsing providers at 8s median, 76.7% accuracy on scanned contracts. Extend, Datalab, Pulse and 2 more benchmarked, 2026.
What this page compares. Scanned-document parsing starts with pixels, so OCR or visual recognition must recover both the words and the distinction between operative and deleted language. Every contract here was rendered to page images at 200 dpi and wrapped back into a PDF, leaving no text layer, embedded font, or structure tree to fall back on.
How to read the result. The ranking uses median end-to-end parse time. Accuracy remains beside latency so a system cannot look fast merely because it returned unusable text.
Workload and controls. Each measured configuration processed the same 94 image-only contract PDFs. The same downstream reader then answered the same 1,500 questions. A best-case parse and a markup-blind baseline bound the score.
Ranked by median parse latency
The ranking uses median end-to-end parse time. Accuracy remains beside latency so a system cannot look fast merely because it returned unusable text.
| Rank | Provider | Type | Accuracy | Gap closed | Median / P95 latency | Parser $ / 1k pages | Parser $ / 1k correct | Total tokens / 1k correct | List price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reductomodel=r-1 · 2026-09-25 build | Specialised document parsers | 76.7% | 76.2% | 8s / 31s | $10.00 | $19.88 | 29.0M | $0.010 / page |
| 2 | Extendengine=parse_performance | Specialised document parsers | 76.5% | 76.0% | 31s / 63s | $25.00 | $49.78 | 26.6M | $0.025 / page |
| 3 | Datalab track changestrack-changes endpoint | Specialised document parsers | 79.7% | 81.0% | 40s / 47s | $10.00 | $19.13 | 25.2M | $0.006 / page |
| 4 | Datalab convertconvert · mode=accurate | Specialised document parsers | 64.3% | 56.4% | 46s / 74s | $10.00 | $23.71 | 29.8M | $0.010 / page |
| 5 | Pulsemodel=pulse-ultra-2 | Specialised document parsers | 66.6% | 60.1% | 58s / 138s | $15.00 | $34.32 | 29.4M | $0.015 / page |
| 6 | LlamaParse agentictier=agentic · 2026-09-24 | Specialised document parsers | 67.5% | 61.6% | 87s / 153s | $12.50 | $28.20 | 29.2M | $0.0125 / page |
| 7 | LlamaParse agentic plustier=agentic_plus · 2026-09-24 | Long running agentic parsers | 75.6% | 74.5% | 143s / 224s | $56.25 | $113.40 | 26.5M | $0.05625 / page |
| 8 | GPT-6 Astragpt-6-astra · pdf in | Frontier models (VLMs) | 91.3% | 99.7% | 233s / 307s | $66.06 | $110.23 | 21.2M | $10 / $50 per 1M tokens |
Claude Fable 5.1: N/A
could not be run — at 200 dpi the rendered pages exceed the model's input limit, and contracts in this corpus run to two dozen pages
Mistral OCR: N/A
not run on this corpus — on the public set it scores the same on both versions, because it rasterises and reads pixels either way and never opens the text layer
How document-processing accuracy, latency, and cost were measured
This is the compact protocol. Corpus construction, all nine task types, parser settings, scoring rules, and cost treatment are documented in the full benchmark methodology →
- Same corpus. 94 legal contracts and 1,500 questions were reused for every measured configuration; no vendor received an easier document set.
- One changing layer. Every arm received the complete PDF and returned Markdown. The downstream reader, question, prompt, and scoring path stayed fixed, so the parser output was the variable under test.
- Independent answer key. Correct and stale answers were derived from tracked changes in the source Word files before vendor output was produced. The residual-answer judge was not shown the parser identity.
- Bounded accuracy. The best-case reference preserves every deletion; the markup-blind baseline removes every mark. Gap closed reports where each parser landed between those controls.
- Separate operational metrics. Parse latency and measured parser spend are reported beside semantic accuracy, never blended into a synthetic score. Published list price remains separate from measured corpus spend.
- Reproducible evidence. The benchmark runner and published data are open in openbenchmarks-labs/document-processing ↗.
What this ranking establishes
Semantic accuracy
A correct answer follows the language the parties agreed. A stale answer follows language they struck, while a fused answer combines deleted and surviving text into a value that never existed.
Independent controls
The best-case reference preserves every deletion. The baseline removes every mark. Gap closed places each measured system between those controls instead of pretending 100% is always reachable.
Scope
Scanned-document parsing starts with pixels, so OCR or visual recognition must recover both the words and the distinction between operative and deleted language. Every contract here was rendered to page images at 200 dpi and wrapped back into a PDF, leaving no text layer, embedded font, or structure tree to fall back on.
Questions answered by this comparison
Which provider leads best ocr apis by latency?
Reducto leads this table at 8s median, 76.7% accuracy. The result comes from 1,500 questions across 94 contracts.
What does document-parsing accuracy mean here?
Accuracy is the share of questions answered from the operative contract language. The markup-blind baseline scored 29.0%. Stale rate separately counts answers taken from deleted language.
How should latency and cost be read beside accuracy?
Reducto recorded 8s median parse time and $10.00 in measured parse cost per 1,000 pages. The full board also divides parse cost and the answering agent's tokens by correct answers, which shows what a parser costs for every 1,000 right answers it leads to.
How was this document-processing comparison independently benchmarked?
Each system converted the same full PDFs to Markdown. The same reader model then answered the same hidden-ground-truth questions; vendor identity was not shown to the residual-answer judge.
What documents does this benchmark cover?
Scanned-document parsing starts with pixels, so OCR or visual recognition must recover both the words and the distinction between operative and deleted language. Every contract here was rendered to page images at 200 dpi and wrapped back into a PDF, leaving no text layer, embedded font, or structure tree to fall back on.
Read the complete Document Processing Benchmark
Task design, corpus transformation, parser settings, scoring, controls, cost accounting, and both tagged-PDF and scanned-PDF leaderboards live on the Document Processing Benchmark →