PDF.co vs Tesseract OCR
PDF.co
pdf.coTesseract OCR
tesseract-ocr.github.ioSide by side
| Figure | PDF.co | Tesseract OCR |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $8.99/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 11 | 1 |
| Spec score · OCR API Software | 8.4 (#8) | 8.2 (#15) |
| Integrations | Official integrations include Make, Zapier, n8n, SharePoint, Airtable, Salesforce, Power Automate, UiPath, Blue Prism, Bubble and others. | The project documentation lists language wrappers including Python, Java, Swift, Flutter, Ruby, Rust, and Go. |
| Purpose | PDF.co provides low-code REST APIs to automate PDF conversion, editing, extraction, and related document workflows. | Tesseract is an open source text recognition (OCR) engine for extracting printed text from images. |
| Support | The company says customers can contact engineers who built the product and describes its customer service as developer-friendly. | The project directs users to its documentation and FAQ, forums, past issues and mailing lists, and asks that repository issues be used for bugs rather than questions. |
| What it does | PDF.co is a low-code REST API platform for converting, editing, extracting, generating and automating PDF workflows. | Tesseract is an open source OCR engine that extracts printed text from images. |
Plans
PDF.co
- Basic$8.99 a month
- Personal$22.49 a month
- Business 1$44.99 a month
- Business 2$89.99 a month
- Business 3$270 a month
- Basic$8.99 a month
- Personal$22.49 a month
- Business 1$44.99 a month
- Business 2$89.99 a month
- Business 3$270 a month
In their own words
Tesseract OCR
Tesseract OCR is a free, open-source engine that extracts printed text from images. It can be run from the command line or used through an API; the project does not include a graphical application. It recognizes more than 100 languages out of the box and supports Unicode UTF-8. Version 4 introduced an LSTM neural-network engine for line recognition while retaining the legacy character-pattern engine. Input formats include PNG, JPEG, TIFF, JPEG 2000, GIF, WebP, BMP, and PNM. Output formats include plain text, hOCR, PDF, TSV, ALTO, and PAGE. Tesseract cannot read PDF files directly, although PDF is available as an output format; the documentation suggests converting files or using OCRmyPDF. The project documents wrappers for several languages, including Python, Java, Swift, Flutter, Ruby, Rust, and Go, as well as C and C++ APIs. The repository code uses Apache License 2.0, though dependencies may have different licenses. Image quality may need improvement for better recognition results.