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OCR and document parsing engines in 2026

5 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, ABBYY FineReader has the most readers, about 143 a month. 30 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. PaddleOCR leads with 92k stars, ahead of Tesseract. 28 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: Apache-2.0 (13), MIT (8) and GPL-3.0 (6).

Commercial OCR and document parsing engines

  1. 1
    Azure AI Document Intelligence Microsoft

    Explore Azure Document Intelligence (as part of Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools). Extract document text, structure, and fields with AI models.

    Building block Production-ready A team on Azure needs to extract structured data from invoices, forms or contracts.

    Commercial
  2. 2
    ABBYY FineReader ABBYY

    ABBYY's latest AI-based OCR technology powers this PDF editor software. Use tool to convert files (PDF to Excel, PDF to Word, etc.), edit, share, collaborate & more!

    Complete system Production-ready You regularly need accurate OCR of scanned documents into editable formats on your own computer.

    143 readers a month Since 1993 Commercial
  3. 3
    Amazon Textract Amazon Web Services

    Amazon Textract is a machine learning (ML) service that uses optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically extract text, handwriting, and data from scanned PDF documents, forms, and tables.

    Building block Production-ready You build document pipelines on AWS and need OCR plus table and form extraction at scale.

    Commercial
  4. 4
    Google Document AI Google

    The Document AI solutions suite includes pretrained models for document processing, Workbench for custom models, and Warehouse to search and store.

    Building block Production-ready Your team runs on Google Cloud and needs document extraction with custom processors.

    Commercial
  5. 5
    Rossum Rossum

    Automate complex transactional workflows with Rossum’s AI document processing solution. Reduce manual tasks, increase accuracy, drive efficiency.

    Complete system Production-ready An AP or logistics team processes large volumes of varied supplier documents and wants extraction with human review.

    Commercial

New open-source projects

  1. 1
    Jev-chat-jarvis jev-chat

    The chat decision assistant: before you reply, Jev reads the chat, judges intent and risk, and drafts replies you fill in with one tap. You press send. Android · Windows · macOS · iOS | 聊天辅助决策工具:先看懂对方再回复,发不发由你。

    ★ 8.2k MIT Kotlin Active, pushed yesterday

Open-source OCR and document parsing engines

Complete systems you can adopt 2

  1. 1
    Easydict tisfeng

    一个简洁优雅的词典翻译 macOS App。开箱即用,支持离线 OCR 识别,支持有道词典,🍎 苹果系统词典,🍎 苹果系统翻译,OpenAI,Gemini,DeepL,Google,Bing,腾讯,百度,阿里,小牛,彩云和火山翻译。A concise and elegant Dictionary and Translator macOS App for looking up words and translating text.

    Complete system Production-ready You read or write in several languages on a Mac and want quick lookups.

    ★ 15k GPL-3.0 Swift Active, pushed 7 days ago
  2. 2
    LunaTranslator HIllya51

    视觉小说翻译器 / Visual Novel Translator

    Complete system Production-ready You play Japanese visual novels and want live translation.

    ★ 14k GPL-3.0 C++ Active, pushed 15 days ago

Building blocks for your own system 6

  1. 1
    PaddleOCR PaddlePaddle

    Turn any PDF or image document into structured data for your AI. A powerful, lightweight OCR toolkit that bridges the gap between images/PDFs and LLMs. Supports 100+ languages.

    Building block Production-ready You need strong OCR, especially for Chinese and Asian scripts, in a document pipeline.

    ★ 92k Apache-2.0 Python Active, pushed 2 months ago
  2. 2
    Tesseract tesseract-ocr

    Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine (main repository)

    Building block Production-ready You need free, offline OCR for reasonably clean printed text.

    ★ 77k Apache-2.0 C++ Active, pushed 5 days ago
  3. 3
    Docling docling-project

    Get your documents ready for gen AI

    Building block Production-ready You feed business documents into RAG or LLM workflows and need reliable local parsing.

    ★ 70k MIT Python Active, pushed yesterday
  4. 4
    OpenDataLoader PDF opendataloader-project

    PDF Parser for AI-ready data. Automate PDF accessibility. Open-source.

    Building block Usable You need fast, deterministic PDF extraction locally, with an optional AI mode for hard pages.

    ★ 30k Apache-2.0 Java Active, pushed 4 days ago
  5. 5
    Pdf-inspector firecrawl

    Fast Rust library for PDF inspection, classification, and text extraction. Intelligently detects scanned vs text-based PDFs to enable smart routing decisions.

    Building block Usable Your pipeline processes many PDFs and you want to skip OCR where text is already present.

    ★ 20k MIT Rust Active, pushed 11 days ago
  6. 6
    Unstructured Unstructured-IO

    Convert documents to structured data effortlessly. Unstructured is open-source ETL solution for transforming complex documents into clean, structured formats for language models. Visit our website to learn more about our enterprise grade Platform product for production grade workflows, partitioning, enrichments, chunking and embedding.

    Building block Production-ready You are building document ingestion for an LLM app and need many file types handled.

    ★ 16k Apache-2.0 HTML Active, pushed 4 days ago

Developer tools 2

  1. 1
    OCRmyPDF ocrmypdf

    OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched

    Developer tool Production-ready You have scanned PDFs that need to become searchable, in batch or a pipeline.

    ★ 35k MPL-2.0 Python Active, pushed 9 days ago
  2. 2
    Skill_Seekers yusufkaraaslan

    Convert documentation websites, GitHub repositories, and PDFs into Claude AI skills with automatic conflict detection

    Developer tool Usable You want Claude to work from a library's docs without hand-writing a skill.

    ★ 15k MIT Python Active, pushed 33 days ago

All 30 open-source document processing projects

Compared head to head

Open-source licenses

  • Permissive: 21. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
  • Strong copyleft: 6. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
  • Network copyleft: 2. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
  • Weak copyleft: 1. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.

Languages

Python 16, Rust 3, C# 3, C++ 2, Java 1, HTML 1, Swift 1, Kotlin 1, JavaScript 1 and TypeScript 1.

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