We outperformed Mistral OCR with a tiny team

#1

Post by apichar » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

Mistral recently launched their OCR model, claiming to be the best in the world. We put that claim to the test against JigsawStack vOCR — our own OCR solution, built by a team of just three people.

We benchmarked both models across real-world multilingual documents, handwriting recognition, structured data extraction, and bounding box accuracy. Here’s a quick breakdown:

- Languages: Mistral supports 12 benchmarked languages, while JigsawStack vOCR handles 70+ including Telugu, Hindi, and lesser-used scripts.

- Handwriting Recognition: Mistral struggles with handwritten and distorted text, while JigsawStack vOCR accurately extracts text from printed materials, handwriting, and even text on walls.

- Structured Output: Mistral requires additional post-processing with an LLM for structured data, while JigsawStack natively returns structured JSON output.

- Bounding Boxes: Mistral OCR does not provide bounding box data, while JigsawStack supports both sentence and word-level positions.

Check out the full breakdown with examples, screenshots, and API comparisons in our blog post Mistral OCR vs. JigsawStack vOCR here: https://jigsawstack.com/blog/mistral-ocr-vs-jigsawstack-vocr

We'd love to hear feedback and answer any questions! If you’re building with OCR, try out JigsawStack vOCR and let us know your thoughts.

Re: We outperformed Mistral OCR with a tiny team

#2

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: We outperformed Mistral OCR with a tiny team

#3

Post by billconan » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 6:25 PM UTC

is yours more expensive? on your pricing page, your plan is 0.05 per invocation. how many pages can be handled by a single invocation?

Re: We outperformed Mistral OCR with a tiny team

#4

Post by yorwba » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 6:42 PM UTC

Your colleague ykjs already told us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43289571

Re: We outperformed Mistral OCR with a tiny team

#5

Post by apichar » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 8:38 PM UTC

billconan wrote: post #3

is yours more expensive? on your pricing page, your plan is 0.05 per invocation. how many pages can be handled by a single invocation?

Our pricing model is being updated soon to be even more cost-effective. Currently, we support up to 10 pages per API request. With the upcoming token-based pricing, costs will drop significantly to just $1.40 per 1M tokens.

Re: We outperformed Mistral OCR with a tiny team

#6

Post by apichar » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 8:44 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #4

Your colleague ykjs already told us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43289571

True- I saw that too, but I also wanted to start a thread to chat with the community and hear different perspectives. Would love to get your thoughts!

Re: We outperformed Mistral OCR with a tiny team

#7

Post by billconan » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 8:52 PM UTC

apichar wrote: post #5

billconan wrote: post #3

is yours more expensive? on your pricing page, your plan is 0.05 per invocation. how many pages can be handled by a single invocation?

Our pricing model is being updated soon to be even more cost-effective. Currently, we support up to 10 pages per API request. With the upcoming token-based pricing, costs will drop significantly to just $1.40 per 1M tokens.

how do a client break a pdf into 10 page chunks? can a pdf file be uploaded, or we are expected to upload rasterized images?

I also feel that token is not a comprehensible unit for many customers. "page" is better.

Re: We outperformed Mistral OCR with a tiny team

#8

Post by apichar » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

billconan wrote: post #7

apichar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our pricing model is being updated soon to be even more cost-effective. Currently, we support up to 10 pages per API request. With the upcoming token-based pricing, costs will drop significantly to just $1.40 per 1M tokens.

how do a client break a pdf into 10 page chunks? can a pdf file be uploaded, or we are expected to upload rasterized images? I also feel that token is not a comprehensible unit for many customers. "page" is better.

You can upload a PDF directly, and the vOCR API supports a page_range parameter so you can specify which pages to process in a single request (e.g., [1,10]).

If your PDF has more than 10 pages, you can make multiple requests, each specifying a different page range (e.g., [1,10], [11,20], etc.). No need to manually split the file.

Also, I totally get that tokens can feel abstract. However by making this shift we can focus on processing time. In doing so the token-based pricing model allows us to be more flexible and provide more at a cheaper cost.

For example, instead of $0.05 per invocation it could be as low as $0.0014–$0.0035 per page depending on factors like the amount of text extracted and formatting.

We do appreciate the feedback and will continue make this approach as transparent as possible.