OCRmyPDF vs ocrs
OCRmyPDF
ocrmypdf.readthedocs.ioocrs
github.comSide by side
| Figure | OCRmyPDF | ocrs |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · OCR API Software | 8.2 (#12) | 7.5 (#23) |
| Language support | Results may be poor when a document contains languages not specified in the language argument. | It currently recognizes the Latin alphabet only, with support for more languages planned. |
| OCR engine | It uses Tesseract to recognize text in PDF page images. | Its neural network models are trained in PyTorch, exported to ONNX, and run using the RTen engine. |
| Purpose | OCRmyPDF adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDF files while preserving the original PDF as much as possible. | ocrs is a Rust library and CLI tool for extracting text from images using OCR. |
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.