Which is cheaper, Tesseract or OCRmyPDF?

Tesseract. Tesseract is free and OCRmyPDF is 1 credit / page.

Which is more accurate?

It depends on the document. Tesseract is strongest at clean printed text, free, and OCRmyPDF at searchable pdfs from scans. Run a few of your own files through both and compare the output.

Yes. Put one as model and the other in fallbacks. If the first fails, the second reads the page, and you pay only for the one that answered.

Tesseract vs OCRmyPDF

Tesseract is cheaper per page; Tesseract is faster.

Get API key All models

	Tesseract`tesseract/tesseract`	OCRmyPDF`ocrmypdf/ocrmypdf`
Type	Open source	Open source
Price	Free	1 credit / page
Per 1,000 pages	$0.00	$1.00
Typical speed	0.6 s / page	1.0 s / page
Best for	Clean printed text, free	Searchable PDFs from scans
Inputs	PDF, images	PDF, images
Languages	100+ languages	100+ languages (via Tesseract)
Max pages per request	500	1,000
Tables	No	No
Handwriting	No	No
Math	No	No
Bounding boxes	No	No
Confidence	No	No
Forms	No	No
Multilingual	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
On OCRRouter	Available	Coming soon

Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.

What each one is

Tesseract

The classic open-source OCR engine. Plain text from clean printed scans.

Tesseract details

OCRmyPDF

Command-line tool that adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDFs, using Tesseract.

OCRmyPDF details

Use one, fall back to the other

Request body

{
  "model": "tesseract/tesseract",
  "fallbacks": ["ocrmypdf/ocrmypdf"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

More comparisons

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