OpenBook vs Surya
OpenBook
freedomscientific.comSurya
github.comSide by side
| Figure | OpenBook | Surya |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $400/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 3 |
| Spec score · OCR software | 7.2 (#40) | 8.7 (#6) |
| Headquarters | Clearwater, Florida, United States | Manhattan, New York, United States |
| Supported inputs | both | both |
| Intended users | The software is designed for people who are blind or have low vision and need access to printed and electronic materials. | Datalab says its platform serves AI/ML teams, enterprises, and product teams building AI agents, RAG systems, and document automation workflows. |
| Primary platform | desktop | desktop |
| Purpose | OpenBook converts printed materials into speech or large print on a computer, including books, assignments, bills, and PDF documents. | Surya is a 650M-parameter OCR model for text recognition, layout analysis, reading order, and table recognition. |
Plans
OpenBook
- Perpetual LicensePrice not published
- OpenBook Perpetual License$1,100, paid once
In their own words
OpenBook
OpenBook has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.