Mistral OCR API vs Unstructured API + MCP

Mistral OCR API

Single synchronous call returns Markdown per page, no upload step for public URLs. OCR API at 99.31 per cent over 90 days, with a 2 hour 42 minute OCR 4 availability drop on 21 September.

Unstructured API + MCP

Apache-2.0 library partitions 45+ file types locally at no cost, tagged 11 times since 3 July. No status page, no published rate limits and no SLA.

Mistral OCR API

1. Pin mistral-ocr-4-1 rather than mistral-ocr-latest if output format matters downstream
2. Set table_format to html for tables with merged cells
3. Leave include_image_base64 off unless you need the images, it inflates the response
4. Pass pages to OCR only the pages you need, since billing is per page
5. Upload private files through /v1/files and pass the signed URL

Unstructured API + MCP

1. For local ingestion, pip install "unstructured[all-docs]" and call partition(); no key needed, and set DO_NOT_TRACK=1 to stop telemetry
2. Transform returns 202 with a Location header for long parses; poll it, then pass the parse id as parse_id to Extract
3. Uploaded files expire after 24 hours; keep the original and re-upload on a 404
4. Treat 409 parse_expired and 410 result_expired as a signal to rerun the parse, not to retry
5. Check for an existing job ID before resubmitting, since there's no idempotency key