# Clairic vs Docling (slim)

> Clairic scores 68.3 (B) to Docling's 64.3 (B) for document extraction. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cloudflare-clairic-vs-docling.md (~5,600 tokens) · this version ~3,530 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cloudflare-clairic-vs-docling.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cloudflare-clairic-vs-docling
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
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Clairic scores 68.3 (B) on agent readiness against Docling's 64.3 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Docling leads on reliability, payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do document extraction.

- Clairic: B 68.3, rank #290 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/cloudflare-clairic.min.md
- Docling: B 64.3, rank #477 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/docling.min.md
- Clairic, good for Typed fields, estimates and next-step forecasts from emails, invoices, receipts and other text or images inside Cloudflare, each with a null probability and confidence. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 85 against 77; Security & auth, 75 against 53; Transparency & trust, 81 against 65. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install; Free to start without a card; No incidents deducted, where Docling loses 8 points for them.
- Docling, good for Self-hosted PDF and Office conversion to Markdown or JSON for RAG and agents that can't send documents out. Ahead on Reliability, 85 against 58; Payments & pricing, 60 against 40; Maintenance & community, 89 against 57. Also No key needed to call it; Runs on your own machine; Open source.

| Category | Clairic | Docling |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 58 | 85 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 85 | 77 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 78 | 77 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 75 | 53 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 60 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 57 | 89 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 81 | 65 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Clairic | Docling |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model API | SDK + MCP |
| Vendor | Cloudflare | Docling Project (LF AI & Data Foundation, started at IBM Research Zurich) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{account_id}/ai/run/@cf/cloudflare/clairic` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | stdio, Streamable HTTP, HTTP |
| Auth | API key | None |
| Pricing | Freemium | Free |
| Licence | Proprietary hosted preview under Cloudflare's Self-Serve Subscription Agreement and the model page's own terms. Cloudflare says open weights will follow soon, with no date or licence named | MIT |
| Tools exposed | none | 25 |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| MCP registry | not listed | `io.github.docling-project/docling-mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-05 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-09-12 | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not read yet |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | not read yet |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | not read yet |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not read yet |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | not read yet |
| Popularity | none | 70k stars, 947k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.3/5 (4) | none |

Why the edge:
- Maintenance & community, Docling +32: Clairic 57 (Read for a model. Released on 19 October 2026, 13 days before this check, with no Clairic change in the Workers AI changelog since (30). For churn and notice, Cloudflare calls the endpoint an early checkpoint and says it will keep improving it with each checkpoint, under an unversioned ID, so the model can change under a caller with no stated notice (2 of 8). We found no stated minimum notice for Workers AI model changes, and the model page's terms let Cloudflare stop supplying Clairic. The changelog gave 22 days' notice for the 30 May 2026 retirements and none for the 28 July paid-only change (4 of 12). A dated changelog entry on launch day. Cloudflare's community and support channels weren't checked (9 of 15). Cloudflare's SDKs are current, TypeScript 7.3.0 and Python 5.9.0 tagged 2 October 2026, still the newest on 1 November per the Workers AI listing's check, with nothing specific to Clairic (10 of 15). No weights, code or package published to check. Cloudflare's Hugging Face account, read on 1 November, still holds only the three Clef models (2 of 10). 30 + 2 + 4 + 9 + 10 + 2 = 57.); Docling 89 (v2.148.0 on 5 November 2026, the day before this check (30). 13 releases from 9 October to 5 November (20). Open issues and pull requests are numerous, an AI triage workflow and PR reminders run, and six maintainers are named; replies not sampled (17 of 25). docling-mcp publishes to the official MCP registry on release under io.github.docling-project, per its workflow and server.json; the registry entry itself was not read (12 of 15). CI, a dependency-update workflow and uv.lock (10). 30+20+17+12+10 = 89.)
- Reliability, Docling +27: Clairic 58 (Scored as a hosted model on Workers AI, as Clef is. www.cloudflarestatus.com is a Statuspage with Workers AI as its own component (20). Clairic was released on 19 October 2026, so its public record is 13 days long on 1 November. The incidents feed read on 20 October covered 5 to 19 October, and the feed read on 1 November holds 50 incidents from 16 to 31 October. Since release, Workers AI is named only in "Issues with AI Security for Apps" on 27 October, intermittent failures in unsafe topic detection with impact none, which doesn't touch Clairic. The 23 October network incident, labelled major, describes some traffic between Ashburn and Atlanta and some customers in North America, so it reads as partial, as cloudflare-workers-ai and cloudflare-r2 read it. The 15 October Workers AI incident came four days before release. A record this short reads as 15 of 30 in this run (pplx-decider, openai-decisions-api), so the 20 October 8, which isn't a checklist value, is brought into line (15). The model page puts Clairic under Text Generation, whose default limit is 300 requests a minute, though the limits page doesn't name it (13 of 15). The errors page gives 429 two internal codes, 3036 for a spent free allocation and 3040 for capacity, per the Workers AI listing's check. No `Retry-After` was found for a 3040. A call has no side effects, so a retry is safe (10 of 15). No SLA for Workers AI found (0). Clairic is still a preview on its model page, re-read on 1 November, and in its catalogue and changelog entries (0 of 10). 20 + 15 + 13 + 10 + 0 + 0 = 58.); Docling 85 (Local-software lines, graded on the library with docling-serve and docling-mcp. Installs from PyPI (`docling` 2.148.0, per the PyPI release feed) for Python 3.10 and later on macOS, Linux and Windows (20). Public CI workflows for checks, tests and heavy examples; the pass state of the default branch was not read (20 of 25). About 719 open issues and 223 open pull requests on the repository page against 13 releases in four weeks, many of them fixes; replies not sampled (15 of 25). Semantic-release changelog with Feature and Fix sections and Breaking sections where they apply (15). Version 2.x since 2024 (15). 20+20+15+15+15 = 85.)
- Security & auth, Clairic +22: Clairic 75 (Read for a model API. Cloudflare API tokens limited to Workers AI permissions on one account, revocable, with optional expiry and IP address filtering, per the Workers AI listing's check of 9 October. Permission is per account, not per model (27 of 30). The Workers AI data usage page, updated 16 October 2026, says standard inference keeps no inputs or outputs after the response and Customer Content isn't used to train models. The Clairic post and model page add nothing on data (18 of 20, as Clef). Clairic reads untrusted text and images such as customer emails and receipts, and returns spans copied from them. The extraction models page says to match safeguards to risk and to check results or require human review before consequential or irreversible actions, and the post says handing a decision model typed values in place of a raw email narrows its injection exposure. No guidance on adversarial or injected input to Clairic itself was found (6 of 15). Per-request logs come through AI Gateway when it's used, and account audit logs record token changes, per the Cloudflare MCP listing's check (6 of 15). security.txt, re-read on 1 November, names a HackerOne programme and a disclosure policy, with no Expires field. Cloudflare's ISO certifications page, read on 1 November, says Cloudflare is certified to ISO 27001 (since 2019, now to its 2022 edition), ISO 27018 and ISO 27701, with a scope of the Cloudflare global cloud platform. 2 held back for the missing Expires field, as cloudflare-r2, cloudflare-workers-ai and cloudflare-ai-gateway read the same evidence (18 of 20, 15 before, when certifications went unread). 27 + 18 + 6 + 6 + 18 = 75.); Docling 53 (Framework reading. No credentials for local use; docling-serve has one optional shared key, off by default (20 of 30). Remote services are off unless explicitly enabled, local file fetch is guarded by flags, and MCP tools carry read-only and destructive annotations; manipulation tools can delete items and save files (12 of 20). Converted documents are untrusted text and no prompt-injection guidance was found (3 of 15). Logging only, no audit trail (3 of 15). A disclosure policy with private reporting, 28 advisories published in public with fixed versions, under the LF AI & Data Foundation; no bug bounty (15 of 20). 20+12+3+3+15 = 53. The advisories themselves are the deduction.)
- Payments & pricing, Docling +20: Clairic 40 (No x402, MPP or L402 for Clairic. Machine Payments on `POST /ai/run` lists four other models, read on 20 October 2026 (0). $0.10 per million input tokens (9,091 neurons) on the pricing page, last updated 19 October 2026, and on the model page, with no output charge (20). Workers AI includes 10,000 neurons a day on the Free plan, about 1.1 million Clairic input tokens, and Cloudflare's Free plan needs no card per the 30 September check (20). The hosted route needs a person to sign up in a browser, and there are no weights to run yourself yet (0). Price re-read on the model page on 1 November. 0 + 20 + 20 + 0 = 40.); Docling 60 (Self-hosted rule. Free MIT software with nothing to buy, so 20 + 20 + 20, and no payment protocol (0). 60.)
- Transparency & trust, Clairic +16: Clairic 81 (Closed for now. Cloudflare intends to release open weights soon, with no date or licence named, and no Clairic repository was public on Hugging Face on 1 November 2026. The terms are Cloudflare's Self-Serve Subscription Agreement plus the model page's own terms, which supply Clairic as is (15 of 30, closed with clear terms). The data usage page (16 October 2026) says no training and no retention for standard inference, and Cloudflare's privacy policy and DPA exist, per the Cloudflare MCP check (26 of 30). Dated notices on the Workers AI changelog but no deprecation policy, and the model terms say Cloudflare may stop supplying it with no refund or credit (10 of 20). Cloudflare's subprocessor page names third parties and group companies with locations, per the Cloudflare MCP check of 1 October. Where Clairic inference runs isn't stated (14 of 20). 15 + 26 + 10 + 14 = 65.); Docling 65 (MIT, an OSI licence, with model licences noted as separate (30). Runs locally, remote services off by default and air-gapped use documented; no privacy statement is needed for local use, but model downloads from Hugging Face on first run are only partly described (22 of 30). Breaking changes are marked in the changelog, with no deprecation policy or dated notices (10 of 20). No telemetry found in the source; nothing to opt out of (15 of 20). 30+22+10+15 = 77.)
- Schema & documentation, Clairic +8: Clairic 85 (The model page publishes input and output JSON Schemas, also as raw files, with a `type` enum of nine field kinds, enums for list items, scale and forecast interval, and bounds on decimals, horizon and `null_threshold`. `min`, `max`, `step` and every answer's `value` carry no type, and Cloudflare's OpenAPI has only the generic `/ai/run/{model_name}` path (21 of 25, one below Clef for the untyped bounds and values). Workers AI's llms.txt lists Clairic, and the model page has a Markdown copy (10). The extraction models page says when to use an extraction model, a decision model or a generative model, with invoice examples, and has a limitations section. The changelog entry and the post add when not to rely on it, for multi-step arithmetic, aggregation across table rows and long-horizon forecasts (18 of 20). Field specs require `type`, list fields require `items`, and field names have a pattern. The state is free-form by design (13 of 15). Examples in JavaScript, Python and curl with a full response, and the Workers AI error table, with nothing specific to Clairic such as an invalid field spec (13 of 15). A dated changelog entry on 19 October 2026, but the model ID carries no version and Cloudflare calls the endpoint an early checkpoint it expects to improve (10 of 15). 21 + 10 + 18 + 13 + 13 + 10 = 85.); Docling 77 (No OpenAPI file is published; docling-serve is a FastAPI app that serves its schema when run, and docling-mcp's tools carry typed inputs with Field descriptions from Pydantic (20 of 25). No llms.txt on the docs site; Markdown docs and AGENTS.md in the repository (5 of 10). MCP tool docstrings say what each tool returns and which other tool supplies its key, with little on when not to use one (14 of 20). Pydantic types with descriptions, few enums (12 of 15). Many runnable examples in docs/examples, with errors raised as Python exceptions that name the fix, such as OperationNotAllowed and unknown document keys listing valid ones (11 of 15). Changelog per release (15). 20+5+14+12+11+15 = 77.)