Prizmo vs Tesseract OCR

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.

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.