OCRFlux-3B
End-to-end OCR model using vision-language architecture.
About
OCRFlux-3B is a 3 billion parameter vision-language model from the ChatDOC team that converts PDFs and images into clean, readable Markdown. Single-page parsing handles multi-column layouts, tables, equations, and reading order while stripping headers and footers, but its distinguishing feature is cross-page merging: the toolkit detects tables and paragraphs that continue across page boundaries and stitches them back together, which the project describes as a first among open source OCR tools. On the project's OCRFlux-bench-single benchmark it reports edit distance similarity of 0.971 for English and 0.962 for Chinese. Running it takes an NVIDIA GPU with at least 12 GB of VRAM, with 24 GB recommended, and tensor parallel inference across multiple GPUs is supported. The model weights are published on Hugging Face and the project is Apache 2.0 licensed, so it can be used commercially in document processing and RAG ingestion pipelines.
Should you use OCRFlux-3B?
Pick it when
Use OCRFlux when long reports have tables and paragraphs that break across pages and you want them stitched back together in the Markdown, and you have an NVIDIA GPU with at least 12 GB of VRAM, ideally 24 GB.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it for commercial use without legal review: the code is Apache-2.0, but the Hugging Face weights list the non-commercial Qwen Research License. olmOCR has Apache-2.0 weights, and Docling runs on CPU.
Alternatives to OCRFlux-3B
- olmOCR
Apache-2.0 weights cleared for commercial use and a cluster batch pipeline, but a bigger 7B model and no advertised cross-page table merging.
- MonkeyOCR
Reported to run on an 8 GB RTX 4060 with per-block JSON and coordinates, a lower GPU bar, though its weights are also non-commercial.
- Marker
Runs on a GPU or CPU and also outputs JSON or chunks, but merging tables across pages needs its optional LLM mode backed by a hosted model or local Ollama.
- Docling
CPU-capable with Office formats and RAG integrations, better for broad ingestion than for stitching tables across page breaks.
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Details
- Category
- OCR & Document Processing
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- Minimum VRAM
- 6 GB
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026