OCR4all vs Tesseract OCR
OCR4all
ocr4all.orgTesseract OCR
github.comSide by side
| Figure | OCR4all | Tesseract OCR |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · OCR software | 8.0 (#22) | 9.1 (#2) |
| Founded | 2019 | 1985 |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Supported inputs | both | image |
| License | OCR4all is released under the MIT License. | The code is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and is provided without warranties under the license terms. |
| 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. | Tesseract is an OCR engine and command-line program for extracting printed text from images. |
| Recognition engine | The product page describes text recognition as being carried out with Calamari. | Tesseract 4 and later include an LSTM-based engine focused on line recognition and retain a legacy character-pattern engine. |
| Support | The team page identifies a user support contact, Florian Langhanki, with a University of Würzburg email address. | The README directs users to documentation, FAQs, user and developer forums, past issues, and mailing lists, and says issues should be used for bug reports rather than questions. |
Plans
In their own words
Tesseract OCR
Tesseract OCR is a free, open-source OCR engine and command-line program for extracting printed text from images. It accepts image inputs including PNG, JPEG, and TIFF, and can output plain text, hOCR, PDF, TSV, ALTO, and PAGE formats. PDF options include searchable PDFs and invisible-text-only PDFs. Tesseract 4 and later include an LSTM-based engine focused on line recognition, while Legacy OCR Engine mode retains compatibility with Tesseract 3. The project says it recognizes more than 100 languages out of the box; language data is installed separately from the engine. Developers can build applications with the C or C++ libtesseract API, and the documentation lists wrappers for other languages. The repository code uses the Apache License 2.0. Tesseract does not include a graphical user interface and points users to third-party interfaces. It uses Leptonica to open images, and improving input image quality may be needed for better recognition results. Installation instructions cover Linux, macOS, and Windows, with listed platforms also including Android and self-hosting.