This comparison of optical character recognition software includes:
Name | Founded year | Latest stable version | Latest release year | License | Online | Windows | Mac OS X | Linux | BSD | Android | iOS | Programming language | SDK? | Languages | Fonts | Output Formats | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ABBYY FineReader | 1989 | 16 | 2022 | Proprietary | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | C/C++ | Yes | 192 [1] | All fonts | DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPTX, RTF, PDF, HTML, CSV, TXT, ODT, DjVu, EPUB, FB2 [2] | ABBYY also supplies SDKs for embedded and mobile devices. Professional, Corporate and Site License Editions for Windows, Express Edition for Mac. [3] |
AIDA | 2016 | 13.0 | 2024 | Proprietary | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | All languages using Latin alphabet | Machine and handprinted text, Latin alphabet | DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, TXT, CSV, PDF, JSON, XML | AIDA is able to learn how to extract any value from any document, with a single click on a single document. [4] | |
AnyDoc Software | 1989 | ? | ? | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | VBScript | ? | ? | ? | Works with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents. | |
Asprise OCR SDK | 1998 | 15 | 2015 | Proprietary | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | Java, C#,VB.NET, C/C++/Delphi | Yes | 20+ [5] | ? | Plain text, searchable PDF, XML [6] | Java, C#, VB.NET, C/C++/Delphi SDKs for OCR and Barcode recognition on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Unix. [7] |
CuneiForm | 1996 | 1.1 | 2011 | BSD variant | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | C/C++ | Yes | 28 | Any printed font | HTML, hOCR, native, RTF, TeX, TXT [8] | Enterprise-class system, can save text formatting and recognizes complicated tables of any structure |
E-aksharayan | 2010 | Yes | No | Yes | No | ? | ? | 14 | RTF, TXT, BRL | ||||||||
GOCR | 2000 | 0.52 [9] | 2018 | GPL | Yes [10] | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | C | ? | 20+ | ? | ||
Google Drive OCR or Google Cloud Vision | 2015 | Proprietary | Yes | Browser | Browser | Browser | Unknown | ? | ? | Unknown | Yes | 200+ | All fonts | text | Google blog post [11] [12] | ||
Microsoft Office Document Imaging | ? | Office 2007 | 2007 | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | Uses OmniPage[ citation needed ] | |
Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 | 2011 | ? | 2007 | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ||
OCRFeeder | 2009-03 | 0.8.5 | 2022 | GPL | No | No | No | Yes | No | ? | ? | Python | ? | ? | ? | Features a full user interface and has a command-line tool for automatic operations. Has its own segmentation algorithm but uses system-wide OCR engines like Tesseract or Ocrad | |
Ocrad | ? | 0.29 [13] | 2024 | GPL | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | C++ | Yes | Latin alphabet | ? | Command line | |
OCRopus | 2007 | 1.3.3 | 2017 | Apache | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | Python | ? | All languages using Latin script (other languages can be trained) | Normal Latin script and Fraktur (other scripts can be trained) | TXT, hOCR, [14] PDF [15] | Pluggable framework under active development, used for Google Books |
OmniPage | 1970s | 19.2 | 2015 | Proprietary | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | ? | ? | C/C++, C# [16] | Yes | 125 [17] | Machine and handprinted fonts | DOC/DOCX XLS/XLSX PPTX RTF PDF PDF/A Searchable PDF HTML Text XML ePUB MP3 | Product of Nuance Communications |
Puma.NET | ? | ? | 2009 | BSD | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | C# | Yes | 28 | Any printed font | .NET OCR SDK based on Cognitive Technologies' CuneiForm recognition engine. Wraps Puma COM server and provides simplified API for .NET applications | |
ReadSoft | ? | ? | ? | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | Scan, capture and classify business documents such as invoices, forms and purchase orders integrated with business processes. | |
Scantron | ? | ? | ? | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | For working with localized interfaces, corresponding language support is required. | |
SmartScore | 1991 | 10.5.8 | 2015 | Proprietary | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | For musical scores | |
Tesseract | 1985 | 5.4.1 | 2024 | Apache | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | C++, C | Yes | 100+ [18] | Any printed font | Text, ALTO, hOCR, [19] PDF, others with different user interfaces [20] or the API | Created by Hewlett-Packard; under further development by Google [21] |
Name | Founded year | Latest stable version | Release year | License | Online | Windows | Mac OS X | Linux | BSD | Android | iOS | Programming language | SDK? | Languages | Fonts | Output Formats | Notes |
A 2016 analysis of the accuracy and reliability of the OCR packages Google Docs OCR, Tesseract, ABBYY FineReader, and Transym, employing a dataset including 1227 images from 15 different categories concluded Google Docs OCR and ABBYY to be performing better than others. [22]