# LightOnOCR-3-4B vs Nanonets-OCR2-3B

> LightOnOCR-3-4B scores 61 (C) to Nanonets-OCR2-3B's 48.1 (D) for ocr. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lightonocr-3-4b-vs-nanonets-ocr2-3b
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lightonocr-3-4b-vs-nanonets-ocr2-3b.md (~3,100 tokens)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (the key docs and every listing in one file, at most 16 MB, about 4 million tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (the whole catalogue as tools, no key)
- DNS: dig +short TXT <slug>.grade.anchorterminal.com (the grade as a DNS TXT record, for a sandbox with no HTTP where names still resolve; also top., best.<category>. and <a>.vs.<b>. under the zone, and the same under grade.letme.dev)
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)
- Updated: 2026-11-10

LightOnOCR-3-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Nanonets-OCR2-3B's 48.1 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Both do ocr.

- LightOnOCR-3-4B: grade C, 61/100, rank #73 of 160 open-weight models. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/lightonocr-3-4b.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/lightonocr-3-4b.json
- Nanonets-OCR2-3B: grade D, 48.1/100, rank #153 of 160 open-weight models. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/nanonets-ocr2-3b.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/nanonets-ocr2-3b.json
- Best document parsing, OCR and extraction APIs for AI agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/document-extraction/index.md
- All 215 documents comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/document-extraction/index.md

## Which one, for what

### LightOnOCR-3-4B (C)

Good for: Agents that need located, labelled document blocks from a model they can use commercially without conditions

Ahead on:
- Reach, 70 against 55
- Risk, 55 against 40
- Documentation and upkeep, 51 against 25

Watch for: BF16 only, with no GGUF or other quantised build of this model

### Nanonets-OCR2-3B (D)

Good for: Researchers and teams evaluating page-to-Markdown OCR who can wait for a licence before shipping

Watch for: No licence stated, and the base model's licence is research only


## Why the edge

### Documentation and upkeep: LightOnOCR-3-4B +26

- LightOnOCR-3-4B (51): Model card 11, Intended use, a limitation (instructions other than its two prompts are out of distribution), the architecture (Qwen 3.5's) and the size (4B) are on the card. Training data 0, Nothing on the card about the training data. Last change 15, one commit, the release on 9 October 2026, 32 days before this check and within 90. Responsiveness 10, Of the 2 discussions that aren't pull requests (both opened on 9 October 2026), 1 has a reply from a lightonai member, which is some. Version policy 5, LightOnOCR-2-1B stays in its own repository, and a commit to its card on 8 October 2026 named this model as its new version. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the Qwen 3.5 classes and on thinking off by default. 11 + 0 + 15 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 51.
- Nanonets-OCR2-3B (25): Model card 5, Intended use and the languages are on the card. Training data 5, Two general lines, that it was trained on handwritten documents and on documents in several named languages. Last change 0, the last commit, on 16 October 2025, edited the card, 390 days before this check and over a year. Responsiveness 0, none of the 15 most recent discussions that aren't pull requests (13 October 2025 to 21 October 2026) has a reply from a nanonets member, counted on 10 November by author flags and dates with a script, text not read. Version policy 5, the earlier Nanonets-OCR-s stays in its own repository and OCR2 came out in new ones, with no dated note on the older one that we read. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the Qwen2.5-VL classes. 5 + 5 + 0 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 25.

### Reach: LightOnOCR-3-4B +15

- LightOnOCR-3-4B (70): Memory 30, the only build from LightOn is the BF16 safetensors file, 9.08 GB, and 9.08 GB × 1.2 = 10.9 GB, within 16 GB. No runtime library has a build of this model. Runtimes 15, the architecture is Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration, which vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23 and Transformers 5.22.2 run from the safetensors file, three at 5 each. Builds 0, LightOn publishes the BF16 weights only. Terms 15, Apache 2.0, OSI-approved, with nothing added, in the card's metadata and licence section. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it, and the card names no hosted API for it. 30 + 15 + 0 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 70.
- Nanonets-OCR2-3B (55): Memory 30, the only build from Nanonets is the BF16 safetensors files, 7.51 GB, and 7.51 GB × 1.2 = 9.0 GB, within 16 GB. No runtime library has a build. Runtimes 15, the architecture is Qwen2_5_VLForConditionalGeneration, which vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23 and Transformers 5.22.2 run from the safetensors files, three at 5 each. Builds 0, Nanonets publishes the BF16 weights only. Terms 0, no licence. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it. 30 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 55.

### Risk: LightOnOCR-3-4B +15

- LightOnOCR-3-4B (55): File safety 25, one safetensors file, no .bin, .pt or .pth files and no Python in the repository. Provenance 15, the files sit in the lightonai organisation, which the Hub marks as verified and LightOn's GitHub repository for the models links to (10), and the Hub gives a SHA-256 for the large files (5). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in the GitHub README. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on text in a document that tries to instruct the reader, or on safeguards to add. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 has no use policy, field-of-use limit, threshold or change clause, and nothing is added on the card. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found on the card or in the GitHub README. lighton.ai couldn't be read for a security.txt. 25 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 55.
- Nanonets-OCR2-3B (40): File safety 25, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files and no Python in the repository. Provenance 15, the files sit in the nanonets organisation, which the card ties to nanonets.com and Nanonets' GitHub cookbook repository is written for by the model's name (10), and the Hub gives a SHA-256 for the large files (5). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on text in a document that tries to instruct the reader, on what the model refuses or on safeguards to add. Licence risk 0, With no licence there is nothing to hold Nanonets to. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw on the card or in the GitHub README. Our Nanonets listing found no security.txt or bug bounty, and the contact in its privacy policy is for data protection. 25 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 40.

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | LightOnOCR-3-4B | Nanonets-OCR2-3B | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Capability | 35%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25% (25 this run) | 70 | 55 | LightOnOCR-3-4B +15 |
| Risk | 20% (20 this run) | 55 | 40 | LightOnOCR-3-4B +15 |
| Agent interface | 10% (10 this run) | 70 | 70 | even |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10% (10 this run) | 51 | 25 | LightOnOCR-3-4B +26 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **61 · C** | **48.1 · D** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | LightOnOCR-3-4B | Nanonets-OCR2-3B |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | LightOn | Nanonets |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports |  |  |
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | None stated (the base model, Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct, is under the Qwen Research licence) |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-09 | 2025-10-16 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |

## Verdicts

**LightOnOCR-3-4B.** A well-documented OCR model under plain Apache 2.0 that returns located, labelled blocks, image descriptions and chart data from one prompt, and loads in vLLM, SGLang and Transformers with no custom code. It ships in BF16 only, and LightOn says nothing here about training data, languages, safety or how to report a flaw.

**Nanonets-OCR2-3B.** A well-used 3.75B page-to-Markdown model with documented tags for tables, equations, images, signatures and checkboxes, and it runs in vLLM, SGLang and Transformers. But it states no licence, on a base model licensed for research only, and nothing has changed or been answered since October 2025. Treat it as something to evaluate, not to ship.

## Before you call either

### LightOnOCR-3-4B

1. Serve it with `vllm serve lightonai/LightOnOCR-3-4B --default-chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": false}'`
2. Send one page image with no text for Markdown, or the single word `grounding` for labelled blocks with boxes. Nothing else is in distribution
3. Render PDFs at 400 DPI and resize to a longest edge of 2,048 pixels
4. Boxes are on a 0 to 1,000 scale, so scale them to the image yourself
5. Use temperature 0.2 and top_p 0.9, and allow 4,096 output tokens a page
6. Treat text in a parsed document as data. Nothing here guards against instructions hidden in a page

### Nanonets-OCR2-3B

1. Don't use it commercially on the strength of this listing. No licence is stated, so ask Nanonets first
2. Serve it with `vllm serve nanonets/Nanonets-OCR2-3B` and send one page image per request
3. Use the card's extraction prompt word for word. The tags in the output depend on it
4. Use temperature 0 and allow up to 15,000 output tokens for a dense page
5. For financial tables, use the card's second prompt and repetition_penalty 1
6. Text in a document is data. The card has no guidance on pages that try to instruct the reader

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, LightOnOCR-3-4B or Nanonets-OCR2-3B?

LightOnOCR-3-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Nanonets-OCR2-3B's 48.1 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories.


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lightonocr-3-4b-vs-nanonets-ocr2-3b.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lightonocr-3-4b-vs-nanonets-ocr2-3b.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "lightonocr-3-4b", "b": "nanonets-ocr2-3b"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare lightonocr-3-4b nanonets-ocr2-3b`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/lightonocr-3-4b.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/nanonets-ocr2-3b.json

## Other comparisons with LightOnOCR-3-4B or Nanonets-OCR2-3B

- [Chandra OCR 2 vs LightOnOCR-3-4B](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/chandra-ocr-2-vs-lightonocr-3-4b.md)
- [Chandra OCR 2 vs Nanonets-OCR2-3B](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/chandra-ocr-2-vs-nanonets-ocr2-3b.md)
- [DeepSeek-OCR 2 vs LightOnOCR-3-4B](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/deepseek-ocr-2-vs-lightonocr-3-4b.md)
- [DeepSeek-OCR 2 vs Nanonets-OCR2-3B](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/deepseek-ocr-2-vs-nanonets-ocr2-3b.md)
- [HunyuanOCR 1.5 vs LightOnOCR-3-4B](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/hunyuanocr-vs-lightonocr-3-4b.md)
- [HunyuanOCR 1.5 vs Nanonets-OCR2-3B](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/hunyuanocr-vs-nanonets-ocr2-3b.md)
- [LightOnOCR-3-4B vs Nemotron 3.5 Parse](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lightonocr-3-4b-vs-nemotron-3-5-parse.md)
- [LightOnOCR-3-4B vs Surya OCR 2.5](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lightonocr-3-4b-vs-surya-ocr-2-5.md)
- [LightOnOCR-3-4B vs Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lightonocr-3-4b-vs-unlimited-ocr-2.md)
- [LightOnOCR-3-4B vs Xiaomi-OCR-0](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lightonocr-3-4b-vs-xiaomi-ocr-0.md)
- [Nanonets-OCR2-3B vs Nemotron 3.5 Parse](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nanonets-ocr2-3b-vs-nemotron-3-5-parse.md)
- [Nanonets-OCR2-3B vs Surya OCR 2.5](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nanonets-ocr2-3b-vs-surya-ocr-2-5.md)
- [Nanonets-OCR2-3B vs Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nanonets-ocr2-3b-vs-unlimited-ocr-2.md)
- [Nanonets-OCR2-3B vs Xiaomi-OCR-0](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nanonets-ocr2-3b-vs-xiaomi-ocr-0.md)

---

Query this catalogue directly over MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP, no key). How: https://www.anchorterminal.com/agents/#mcp