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Show HN: OCR Arena – A playground for OCR models
I built OCR Arena as a free playground for the community to compare leading foundation VLMs and open-source OCR models side-by-side.

Upload any doc, measure accuracy, and (optionally) vote for the models on a public leaderboard.

It currently has Gemini 3, dots.ocr, DeepSeek, GPT5, olmOCR 2, Qwen, and a few others. If there's any others you'd like included, let me know!

I've been really impressed with this model specifically because of how insanely cheap it is: https://replicate.com/ibm-granite/granite-vision-3.3-2b

I didn't expect IBM to be making relevant AI models but this thing is priced at $1 per 4,000,000 output tokens... I'm using it to transcribe handwritten input text and it works very well and super fast.

Love this! Would have liked to see something like textract for a pre-LLM benchmark (but of course that's expensive), and also a distinction between handwritten text and printed one.

But still, this is incredibly useful!

I would be curious to see how Sonnet does. Their models are pretty solid when it comes to PDFs
Sonnet/Opus is being added shortly!
FYI one of the models on the battle was pretty slow to load. Are these also being rated on latency or just quality?
Ultimately, there’s some intersection of accuracy x cost x speed that’s ideal, which can be different per use case. We’ll surface all of those metrics shortly so that you can pick the best model for the job along those axes.
ideally we want people to rate based on quality - but i imagine some of the results are biased rn based on loading time
Please add Chandra by Datalab
Most of these are general LLM’s and not specifically OCR models. Where is Google Vision, Mistral, Paddle, Nanonets, or Chandra??
We wanted to keep the focus on (1) foundation VLMs and (2) open source OCR models.

We had Mistral previously but had to remove it because their hosted API for OCR was super unstable and returned a lot of garbage results unfortunately.

Paddle, Nanonets, and Chandra being added shortly!

Claude would be good!
Claude coming shortly (in the next ~1 hour)
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[under-the-rug stub]

[see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988611 for explanation]

We've got like 10 LLM arenas but nothing for OCR yet, really hope this takes off!
Nice! Would love to see Azure Document Intelligence on this
This is a killer idea!