Prizmo vs Surya

Prizmo scans and edits documents and business cards on iPhone, iPad and Mac, then uses OCR to make their contents available as text. Its on-device OCR supports more than 30 languages; Cloud OCR supports 139 languages and handwriting recognition. Editing tools include perspective cropping, cleanup, brightness and contrast adjustments, edge repair and flattening curved pages. Exports include searchable PDF, TXT, PNG, JPEG and Microsoft Word DOCX, with options for PDF compression and password protection. On iPhone and iPad, uploads can go to iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV or folders available through Apple Files. Those apps also support Apple Shortcuts and x-callback-url automation, while the Mac app includes Prizmo Remix for scanner workflows. Accessibility features include VoiceOver, spoken capture guidance and scene descriptions, and text-to-speech reading. Free versions are available on Mac and iPhone/iPad, with limited text access and watermarked exports. Cloud OCR needs an internet connection and a separate Cloud Plan subscription; the listed plan starts at $0.99 per month. The maker says most operations happen on device and cloud OCR data is deleted after processing.

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.