nowfound

AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Qwen-2.5-32B is now the best open source OCR model

Last week was big for open source LLMs. We got: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) - Gemma-3 (27b) - DeepSeek-v3-0324 And a couple weeks ago we got the new mistral-ocr model. We updated our OCR benchmark to include the new models. We evaluated 1,000 documents for JSON extraction accuracy. Major takeaways: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) are by far the most impressive. Both landed right around 75% accuracy (equivalent to GPT-4o’s performance). Qwen 72b was only 0.4% above 32b. Within the margin of error. - Both Qwen models passed mistral-ocr (72.2%), which is specifically trained for OCR. - Gemma-3…

Qwen 2.5 VL is an open-source optical character recognition model available in 32 billion and 72 billion parameter versions. Designed for document analysis and JSON data extraction, it achieves approximately 75%… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    0.8B-9B native multimodal w/ more intelligence, less compute

    Mar 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Qwen 2.5▲290

    Alibaba's latest AI model series

    2025 · qwenlm.github.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    This is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Qwen or Alibaba

    Jan 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    The Sweet Spot for Open-Source Multimodal AI

    2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Almost exactly 1 year ago, I submitted something to HN about using Llama2 (which had just come out) to improve the output of Tesseract OCR by correcting obvious OCR errors [0]. That was exciting at the time because OpenAI's API calls were still quite expensive for GPT4, and the cost of running it on a book-length PDF would just be prohibitive. In contrast, you could run Llama2 locally on a machine with just a CPU, and it would be extremely slow, but "free" if you had a spare machine lying around. Well, it's amazing how things have changed since then. Not only have models gotten a lot better,…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    Qwen3.5▲288

    The 397B native multimodal agent with 17B active params

    Feb 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    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!

    Nov 2025 · ocrarena.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8BV

    Vision models have been gaining popularity as a replacement for traditional OCR. Especially with Gemini 2.0 becoming cost competitive with the cloud platforms. We've been continuously evaluating different models since we released the Zerox package last year (https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox). And we wanted to put some numbers behind it. So we’re open sourcing our internal OCR benchmark + evaluation datasets. Full writeup + data explorer here: https://getomni.ai/ocr-benchmark Github: https://github.com/getomni-ai/benchmark Huggingface:…

    2025 · getomni.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    High performance in a 24b open-source model

    2025 · mistral.ai · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A powerful open model for agentic coding tasks

    2025 · qwenlm.github.io · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    The open sparse MoE model for agentic coding

    Apr 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    QwQ-32B▲197

    Matching R1 reasoning yet 20x smaller

    2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Qwen's most advanced reasoning model yet

    2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    The sweet-spot open dense model for coding agents

    Apr 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Introducing the world’s best document understanding API

    2025 · mistral.ai · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Qwen3.8-Max + MCP for coding on your local machine, without paying for Qwen Code. Qwen3.8-Max itself runs in the cloud through Qwen Studio — this setup just gives it access to your local files and terminal through MCP. My take: it is slower than Codex and Claude Code, especially in thinking mode, but it does work well. MCP adds some latency too since there’s an extra layer between the model and your machine. In fast mode, it gets noticeably closer. I wouldn’t put it in the same category as Fable or Opus-5. Personally, I’d place it closer to the next Opus 4.7 level in terms of coding ability.…

    Aug 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    Qwen3.8-Flash-Nextfree tier▲108

    The open-weight preview of Qwen4

    Aug 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Pure Javascript OCR for more than 100 Languages 📖🎉🖥 - naptha/tesseract.js

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN! I'm just sharing a project I've been working on during the LLM Efficiency Challenge - you can now finetune Llama with QLoRA 5x faster than Huggingface's original implementation on your own local GPU. Some highlights: 1. Manual autograd engine - hand derived backprop steps. 2. QLoRA / LoRA 80% faster, 50% less memory. 3. All kernels written in OpenAI's Triton language. 4. 0% loss in accuracy - no approximation methods - all exact. 5. No change of hardware necessary. Supports NVIDIA GPUs since 2018+. CUDA 7.5+. 6. Flash Attention support via Xformers. 7. Supports 4bit and 16bit…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    The end-to-end model powering multimodal chat

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Advanced visual-text compression technology

    2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Multimodal AI optimized for real-world coding agents

    Apr 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Contribute to Mega4alik/ollm development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →