PaddleOCR vs Tesseract OCR

PaddleOCR is an open-source OCR and document-processing toolkit for extracting text and structure from documents. Its PP-StructureV3 component turns complex PDFs and document images into Markdown and JSON while preserving their organization, and supports table extraction. PaddleOCR-VL handles multilingual document parsing across 109 languages, while PP-OCRv6 supports 50 languages in one model. PaddleOCR 3.0 also recognizes handwriting. For large document collections, PP-ChatOCRv4 extracts key information and integrates ERNIE 4.5. Models can be used online through the official website or called through an API; the official free API allows up to 20,000 pages of document parsing per day. Documentation describes local, C++, service, Android, iOS, and browser deployment options, among others. The license permits use, modification, distribution, and sale without restriction. SDK languages listed are Python, TypeScript, and Go. Support is available through GitHub Issues. One compatibility note: code written for PaddleOCR 2.x may not run with version 3.x.

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.