Prompt
I'm building a compliance archive and need searchable text from scans, any OCR API recommendations?
Latest observation
Yes — for a compliance archive, you’ll want OCR that is accurate on scans, returns searchable text, and ideally preserves layout/confidence data for auditability. Good options:
Strong general-purpose choices
- Google Cloud Vision OCR / Document AI
- Very strong accuracy on scanned docs
- Good for printed text, forms, tables
- Document AI is better if you want structured extraction too
- AWS Textract
- Great for scanned business documents, forms, tables
- Returns text plus structure and bounding boxes
- Good if you’re already on AWS
- Azure AI Document Intelligence (Form Recognizer)
- Strong OCR and document parsing
- Good enterprise/compliance fit, integrates well with Microsoft stack
If you need high accuracy on messy scans
- ABBYY Vantage / FineReader Engine
- Often considered a top-tier OCR option
- Very good with low-quality scans, skewed pages, mixed layouts
- More enterprise-oriented, usually pricier
Open-source / self-hosted
- Tesseract OCR
- Free and self-hostable
- Fine for clean scans, but usually less accurate than cloud enterprise OCR
- PaddleOCR
- Strong open-source option, often better than Tesseract on difficult images
- Good if you want more control and can run your own pipeline
What to look for for compliance archives
- Searchable text output
- Page-level confidence scores
- Bounding boxes / coordinates for traceability
- Deskew/denoise support
- PDF output with hidden text layer
- PII/security/compliance guarantees: data retention policy, encryption, region controls, SOC 2 / ISO 27001, etc.
Quick recommendation
- If you want enterprise-grade OCR with minimal engineering: ABBYY or Google Document AI
- If you want best fit in AWS/Azure ecosystems: Textract or Azure Document Intelligence
- If you want lower cost / self-hosted: PaddleOCR or Tesseract
If you want, I can also give you:
- a feature-by-feature comparison table, or
- a recommended architecture for archiving scanned PDFs with OCR and search.
Observation history
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