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OCR Vendors & Solutions

Which OCR solution fits your constraints? Start with your situation below.

Start here - What's your main constraint?

Data privacy required?
Healthcare, legal, GDPR compliance
→ Open source, local deployment
Processing 100k+ pages/month?
High volume, need best cost efficiency
→ Budget APIs, batch pricing
Need SLA and support?
Enterprise deployment, compliance
→ Google, Azure, IBM

All Solutions by Category

Data Privacy / On-premise Required

Docling (IBM)

Verified
Open Source Local / Self-hosted MIT

Strengths

FreeDataFrame exportPrivacyVLM pipeline

Weaknesses

SlowerSetup requiredModel downloads

Pricing

Free

Speed

34.95s (10 pages)

Accuracy

High (TableFormer)

Read Our Guide →

PaddleOCR

Open Source Local / Self-hosted Apache 2.0

Strengths

FastMultilingualWell-documented

Weaknesses

Complex layoutsTable extraction limited

Pricing

Free

Speed

~0.5-2s/page

Accuracy

~90-95%

Read Our Guide →

Tesseract

Open Source Local / Self-hosted Apache 2.0

Strengths

Mature100+ languagesWidely supported

Weaknesses

Lower accuracyNo layout analysisPreprocessing required

Pricing

Free

Speed

~1-3s/page

Accuracy

~70-85%

Read Our Guide →

doctr (Mindee)

Coming Soon
Open Source Local / Self-hosted Apache 2.0

Strengths

PyTorch/TensorFlowModern architectureActive development

Weaknesses

Less documentationSmaller community

Pricing

Free

Speed

Fast

Accuracy

High

View Documentation →

Chandra OCR

Coming Soon
Open Source Local / Self-hosted Apache 2.0

Strengths

Top benchmark scoresAllen AI backing

Weaknesses

New projectLimited docs

Pricing

Free

Speed

TBD

Accuracy

83.1% (olmOCR-Bench leader)

View Documentation →

High Volume / Cost Efficiency

Mistral OCR

Verified
API Cloud Proprietary

Strengths

FastMath/equationsMultilingual

Weaknesses

Cloud onlyNo table exportMixed independent reviews

Pricing

$0.001/page

Speed

9.04s (9 pages)

Accuracy

94.9% (claimed)

Read Our Guide →

GPT-4o Vision

API Cloud Proprietary

Strengths

ReasoningContext understandingFlexible output

Weaknesses

ExpensiveSlowRate limits

Pricing

~$5-15/1000 pages

Speed

~5-15s/page

Accuracy

~85-90%

Read Our Guide →

Enterprise / SLA Required

Google Document AI

API Cloud Proprietary

Strengths

Enterprise supportForm parsingEntity extraction

Weaknesses

GCP lock-inPricing tiers complex

Pricing

$1.50/1000 pages

Speed

Fast

Accuracy

83.4% (Mistral benchmark)

View Documentation →

Azure AI Document Intelligence

API Cloud Proprietary

Strengths

Enterprise supportPrebuilt modelsCustom training

Weaknesses

Azure lock-inComplex pricing

Pricing

$1.50/1000 pages

Speed

Fast

Accuracy

89.5% (Mistral benchmark)

View Documentation →

What accuracy do you need at your budget?

Map your cost per 1000 pages to available accuracy levels. Solutions on the green frontier line offer best quality at each price point.

Cost per 1000 pages ($) $0 $1 $5 $10 $15 Accuracy (%) 70% 80% 90% 95% 100% Efficiency Frontier Tesseract PaddleOCR Docling Mistral OCR $1 / 95% Google Doc AI $1.50 / 83% Azure OCR $1.50 / 89% GPT-4o Vision $10 / 87% Open Source (Free) Budget API Enterprise

Note: Accuracy figures are approximate and vary by document type. Position on frontier indicates best value at each price point. Open source solutions dominate the free tier, while Mistral offers the best cost-quality ratio for paid APIs.

Decision Guide by Your Situation

Your data cannot leave your servers

Healthcare records, legal documents, GDPR/HIPAA requirements

→ Docling or PaddleOCR

100% local, no cloud dependencies, free

Docling: Best for tables/structure (financial docs)
PaddleOCR: Best for general text, multilingual

Processing 50k+ pages per month

Need best cost per page, cloud is acceptable

→ Mistral OCR

$0.001/page = $50 for 50k pages, 4x faster than local

At 100k pages/month: $100 vs $1,500 (Google/Azure)
50% batch discount available

Need guaranteed uptime and support

99.9% SLA required, enterprise contracts, phone support

→ Google Document AI or Azure

$1.50/1k pages, enterprise SLA, custom training

Azure: Better if already on Microsoft stack
Google: Better accuracy (89% vs 83%) in benchmarks

Extracting tables from invoices/reports

Need structured data output, CSV/Excel/DataFrame format

→ Docling

Free, TableFormer model, direct DataFrame export

Alternative: Mistral OCR (paid, faster, cloud-only)
GPT-4o works but requires manual parsing ($10/1k pages)

Feature Comparison

Feature Mistral Docling GPT-4o PaddleOCR
Local Deployment No Yes No Yes
Table to DataFrame No Yes Manual No
Math/LaTeX Yes Yes Yes No
Handwriting Yes Limited Yes Limited
GPU Acceleration N/A (cloud) Yes N/A (cloud) Yes
Batch Processing Yes (50% off) Yes Yes Yes

Need Help Choosing?

Check our use-case specific guides

Best for Invoices Best for Handwriting Best for Python