OCR4all vs Surya
OCR4all
ocr4all.orgSurya
github.comSide by side
| Figure | OCR4all | Surya |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $400/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · OCR software | 8.0 (#22) | 8.7 (#6) |
| Headquarters | Würzburg, Germany | Manhattan, New York, United States |
| Supported inputs | both | both |
| Intended users | The product explicitly addresses non-technical users and is described as suitable for people without a computer science background. | Datalab says its platform serves AI/ML teams, enterprises, and product teams building AI agents, RAG systems, and document automation workflows. |
| License | OCR4all is released under the MIT License. | The Surya code is Apache 2.0, while the model weights use a modified AI Pubs Open Rail-M license with commercial-use conditions described in the README. |
| Primary platform | both | desktop |
| Purpose | OCR4all provides a workflow for recognizing historical printed and handwritten material, with user interaction at workflow stages to improve results. | Surya is a 650M-parameter OCR model for text recognition, layout analysis, reading order, and table recognition. |
| Support | The team page identifies a user support contact, Florian Langhanki, with a University of Würzburg email address. | Datalab lists community support on Free, email and Slack support on Team, and dedicated support on Enterprise. |
Plans
In their own words
Surya
Surya is a 650M-parameter OCR model for extracting text and analyzing document structure. It handles layout, reading order and tables, and supports OCR in 91 languages. Surya 2 returns page content as structured blocks that can include HTML, polygons, bounding boxes, confidence values and reading order. Table recognition can provide row and column geometry; full mode can also return HTML with spanning cells and header rows. Equations found in page OCR are represented as KaTeX-compatible LaTeX within math tags. Users can work with a Python package, command-line tools or an interactive Streamlit app for images and PDFs. Layout, OCR and table recognition require an inference backend: vLLM on NVIDIA GPUs or llama.cpp on CPU and Apple Silicon, or a connection to an existing server. Surya is free and open source. The code uses Apache 2.0, while the model weights have a separate modified AI Pubs Open Rail-M license with commercial-use conditions. It is specialized for documents, not photos or natural scenes.