Kraken vs OCRmyPDF
Kraken
kraken.reOCRmyPDF
ocrmypdf.readthedocs.ioSide by side
| Figure | Kraken | OCRmyPDF |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · OCR API Software | 7.5 (#22) | 8.2 (#12) |
| Spec score · OCR software | 7.3 (#36) | 8.5 (#10) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Handwriting OCR | Yes | No |
| Supported inputs | both | |
| Integrations | The documentation lists eScriptorium, OCR4all, the OCR-D suite, and arkindex by Teklia as applications or suites integrated with Kraken. | The documentation identifies Paperless-ngx and Nextcloud OCR as third-party integrations that use OCRmyPDF. |
| Primary platform | desktop | desktop |
| Purpose | Kraken is an open-source automatic text recognition system optimized for historical documents and non-Latin scripts. | OCRmyPDF adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDF files while preserving the original PDF as much as possible. |
Plans
In their own words
OCRmyPDF
OCRmyPDF is free software that adds searchable text to scanned PDF files while retaining the original PDF as much as possible. It uses Tesseract to recognize text in page images and produces PDF/A-2b by default, with regular PDF output available as an alternative. Image-processing options such as deskew can adjust pages to support visual quality and OCR accuracy. When a PDF already contains text, its processing modes can stop with an error, skip affected pages, redo OCR, or force OCR across all pages. OCRmyPDF can also be used as a Python library, and plugins can customize processing steps. Installation methods are documented for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and Docker; Paperless-ngx and Nextcloud OCR are named as third-party integrations. Results may be poor for low-quality scans or languages not specified for processing, and handwriting is not recognized. The project also notes that accuracy may trail commercial solutions. Its documentation advises processing only PDFs users trust and warns that its example Docker web service has no security measures and is not meant for public internet deployment.