I Ran the Same Invoice Through PaddleOCR and GPT-4o

Most OCR comparisons online are SEO-optimized lists without actual test results. I wanted real numbers.

So I generated an invoice, ran it through PaddleOCR and GPT-4o, and recorded everything.

The Test

Simple invoice, white background, standard fonts. The easy case. Real documents are messier.

PaddleOCR: 4.69 seconds, 99.6% confidence

Got everything right. Every number, every dollar sign. But the output is flat - each text region becomes a separate line:

INVOICE
Invoice #: INV-2025-001
Date: December 16, 2025
Bill To:
John Smith
123 Main Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
Description
Qty
Price
Total
Web Development Services
40
$150.00
$6,000.00
...

"Description", "Qty", "Price", "Total" are separate lines. PaddleOCR extracted the text but lost the table structure. Raw ingredients, you reconstruct the recipe.

GPT-4o: 5.18 seconds, ~$0.015

GPT-4o understood this was a table and preserved the structure:

INVOICE

Invoice #: INV-2025-001
Date: December 16, 2025

Bill To:
John Smith
123 Main Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

Description                      Qty       Price           Total
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Web Development Services 40      $150.00     $6,000.00
UI/UX Design                     20         $125.00      $2,500.00
Server Hosting (Annual)          1          $480.00          $480.00
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Subtotal:                                        $8,980.00
Tax (8.5%):                                      $763.30
Total:                                           $9,743.30

The table headers align with values. If you asked "what's the total?", you could find it. GPT-4o understood this was an invoice, not just text on a page.

The Difference

Both took ~5 seconds. Both got the text right. But they're solving different problems:

PaddleOCR is a text extraction engine. It finds text and tells you what it says. Free, fast, accurate. That's it.

GPT-4o is a document understanding system. It reads and interprets. Costs money but thinks for you.

If you're processing 10,000 receipts and just need totals, PaddleOCR + regex. If you need to answer questions about documents, GPT-4o.

The Code

PaddleOCR

# pip install paddlepaddle paddleocr
from paddleocr import PaddleOCR

ocr = PaddleOCR(lang='en')
result = ocr.predict('invoice.png')

for item in result:
    for text in item.get('rec_texts', []):
        print(text)

GPT-4o

# pip install openai
import base64
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI()

with open('invoice.png', 'rb') as f:
    img = base64.b64encode(f.read()).decode()

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": [
        {"type": "text", "text": "Extract all text from this image."},
        {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": f"data:image/png;base64,{img}"}}
    ]}]
)

print(response.choices[0].message.content)

My Take

Start with PaddleOCR. Free, works, handles 90% of cases. When you hit a wall - complex layouts, handwriting, documents needing interpretation - try GPT-4o on those specific cases.

Don't use GPT-4o for bulk processing. At ~$0.015/image, 100,000 documents costs $1,500. PaddleOCR costs nothing.

More

• 47 OCR benchmarks compared
• Best OCR for invoices
• PaddleOCR vs Tesseract