Tradeoff matrix
Five dots is best-in-class. EasyOCR is a lightweight text detector that gives you raw strings fast; Docling is a full document-understanding stack that preserves structure at the cost of heavier compute.
| Dimension | EasyOCR | Docling | What it means for RAG |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layout understanding | Bounding boxes only | Reading order, headings, columns | Structure-aware chunks retrieve dramatically better on reports and papers. |
| Table extraction | Cells flatten to text soup | TableFormer model, real rows and cells | Financial and scientific corpora live or die on table fidelity. |
| Speed and footprint | Light, fast on GPU or CPU | Multiple models per page, heavier | At millions of pages, per-page latency is your cloud bill. |
| Output format | Text plus box coordinates | Markdown, JSON, DocTags | Markdown feeds chunkers and LLMs directly with zero glue code. |
| Language coverage | 80+ scripts | Strong Latin coverage, pluggable OCR | Multilingual scans of signage or receipts favor EasyOCR. |
| Non-document images | Photos, screenshots, signs | Built for page-shaped documents | Wild imagery breaks page-layout assumptions. |
Five-question fit quiz
Answer for the corpus you actually need to ingest. Scoring weights tables and structure heavily because they dominate retrieval quality.
The pipeline you are choosing for
Every RAG ingestion run moves through four stages. Press play or click a stage to see where each engine earns its keep. Tools like Reseek collapse this whole assembly line into a single upload-and-query step; this diagram shows what happens under the hood when you build it yourself.
Or skip the assembly entirely
If you would rather not wire OCR models, chunkers, and vector stores together, hosted stacks like Reseek handle OCR extraction from images and PDFs with smart tagging and semantic search built in, so you upload documents and go straight to querying your content. Use the quiz above when you need to own the pipeline; use a managed layer when the pipeline is not your product.