Tesseract OCR extracts printed text from images using an open-source recognition engine. It can run from the command line or be integrated through an API; the project does not include a graphical interface. Its package includes the libtesseract engine and a command-line program, and developers can use its C or C++ API. Tesseract recognizes more than 100 languages and supports Unicode UTF-8. Version 4 added an LSTM neural-network engine for line recognition while keeping the earlier character-pattern engine. Input formats include PNG, JPEG, TIFF, JPEG 2000, GIF, WebP, BMP, and PNM. It can produce plain text, hOCR, PDF, TSV, ALTO, and PAGE files, but it cannot read PDF files directly. The project lists wrappers for several languages and documentation for compilation and Docker deployment. Tesseract is free under the Apache License 2.0; dependencies may use other licenses. The project notes that image quality can affect recognition. Its security policy supports version 5.5.x and marks earlier versions unsupported.
Who it is for
Tesseract suits developers and command-line users who need OCR for images and can work without a graphical interface. Its documented language wrappers and multiple output formats may also suit software integrations.
What is good
- Free and distributed under Apache License 2.0
- Recognizes more than 100 languages
- Accepts a range of common image formats
- Offers multiple output formats, including PDF
- C and C++ APIs and language wrappers are listed
What to know first
- No graphical user interface is included
- Cannot read PDF files directly
- Earlier than 5.5 versions are unsupported
- Image quality may affect OCR results
Verdict
Tesseract is a free OCR engine with broad language and format support, command-line access, and developer interfaces. It is not a standalone GUI app, and PDF input requires conversion or another tool.
Tesseract OCR plans and pricing
All plansCompared on OCR API software
- Free plan
- Yes
- Structure extraction
- Yes
- SDK languages
- C, C++
