Skip to content
SPECIFICTION
Get listed

OCR4all vs OCRmyPDF

OCR4all

ocr4all.org

OCRmyPDF

ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io

Side by side

FigureOCR4allOCRmyPDF
Price fromFreeFree
Free planYesYes
Free trial——
Open source——
WebYes—
WindowsYesYes
macOSYesYes
LinuxYesYes
API—Yes
Self-hostedYesYes
Plans published11
Spec score · OCR software8.0 (#22)8.5 (#10)
Free planYesYes
Supported inputsbothpdf
Primary platformbothdesktop
PurposeOCR4all provides a workflow for recognizing historical printed and handwritten material, with user interaction at workflow stages to improve results.OCRmyPDF adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDF files while preserving the original PDF as much as possible.

Plans

OCR4all

  • OCR4allFree

OCR4all pricing →

OCRmyPDF

  • OCRmyPDFFree

OCRmyPDF pricing →

In their own words

OCR4all

OCR4all has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

Visit ocr4all.org

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.

Visit ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io