Surya vs WatchOCR
Surya
github.comWatchOCR
watchocr.comSide by side
| Figure | Surya | WatchOCR |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $400/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · OCR software | 8.7 (#6) | 7.6 (#30) |
| Supported inputs | both | both |
| 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 site says that unless otherwise specified, the software is under the GNU General Public License and may be copied, modified, and redistributed subject to the same license for recipients. |
| Primary platform | desktop | both |
| Purpose | Surya is a 650M-parameter OCR model for text recognition, layout analysis, reading order, and table recognition. | WatchOCR is a free OCR server for PDFs that converts image only PDFs and TIFFs into text searchable PDFs. |
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.