Surya vs Tesseract OCR
Surya
github.comTesseract OCR
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Surya | Tesseract OCR |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $400/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · OCR software | 8.7 (#6) | 9.1 (#2) |
| Supported inputs | both | image |
| Installation | The README installs Surya with pip install surya-ocr and lists Docker plus NVIDIA Container Toolkit for NVIDIA GPU use, or llama.cpp for CPU and Apple Silicon. | The documentation describes installation through Linux distributions, macOS package managers, Windows installers, and source builds. |
| Languages | The repository describes Surya as supporting OCR in 90+ languages. | The project says Tesseract supports UTF-8 and recognizes more than 100 languages out of the box. |
| License | The Surya code is Apache 2.0, while the model weights use a modified AI Pubs Open Rail-M license with commercial-use conditions described in the README. | The code is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and is provided without warranties under the license terms. |
| Primary platform | desktop | desktop |
| Purpose | Surya is a 650M-parameter OCR model for text recognition, layout analysis, reading order, and table recognition. | Tesseract is an OCR engine and command-line program for extracting printed text from images. |
| Support | Datalab lists community support on Free, email and Slack support on Team, and dedicated support on Enterprise. | The README directs users to documentation, FAQs, user and developer forums, past issues, and mailing lists, and says issues should be used for bug reports rather than questions. |
Plans
In their own words
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.
Tesseract OCR
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.