Agent Ransack vs Recoll

Agent Ransack is a Windows file-search tool for finding files on a PC or network drive. It can search file contents using Boolean AND, OR, and NOT expressions, as well as Perl-compatible regular expressions. Matching text is highlighted in results, which can be printed, exported, or shared as reports. Listed formats include popular Office files, Office 2010, and OpenOffice. Further search options cover Outlook PST and MSG files, OCR for scanned documents or images, and ZIP, JAR, 7Z, RAR, and TAR archives. Network searches can use mapped drives or UNC paths, and searchable locations include local, removable, and network storage. Lite mode is free for personal and commercial use, but includes no support. Professional mode adds optional paid features, including indexing and advanced reporting and export capabilities. The product supports Windows 10 and later, as well as listed Windows Server versions. Installer choices include combined, portable, and IT-department MSI packages.

Recoll is free desktop search software that finds documents by their contents and file names. It indexes many common document formats and compressed files, including email attachments nested inside archives. Search supports Boolean queries, phrases, proximity, wildcards, and filters for file type or directory tree. Indexing can run periodically as a batch job or continuously for real-time updates. Users can search through a Qt desktop interface, a web browser, the command line, GNOME Shell, KDE KIO, or KRunner; the browser interface queries a Recoll index. A Python 3 extension can query or update that index. Recoll can index PDF attachments and annotations, extract custom XMP metadata, and apply OCR to image-only PDFs using Tesseract or ABBYY FineReader. It supports multiple languages and UTF-8, and users can choose a stemming language at query time. Linux and source are free under the GPL. A contribution is requested for the Windows binary, but no amount is stated. Some formats on Linux and macOS need external applications or libraries, and the Windows port lacks some features, including multithreaded execution.