I'm building a document upload workflow and need OCR for PDFs and images, what should I use?

If you need OCR for both PDFs and images, the best choice depends on whether you want simple, managed OCR or more control/self-hosting.

Good options

1. Google Cloud Vision / Document AI

• Best for: high accuracy, production workflows, scanned PDFs, multipage docs
• Pros: very strong OCR, layout detection, tables/forms, async PDF processing
• Cons: paid service, cloud dependency

2. AWS Textract

• Best for: document workflows, forms, tables, business documents
• Pros: great for extracting structured data, supports PDFs and images
• Cons: can be pricier/less flexible depending on use case

3. Azure AI Document Intelligence

• Best for: enterprise document processing
• Pros: strong OCR + form extraction, good PDF/image support
• Cons: cloud dependency, pricing

4. Tesseract OCR

• Best for: open-source/self-hosted needs
• Pros: free, runs locally, good baseline OCR
• Cons: weaker on complex layouts, tables, handwriting, and noisy scans; PDF handling needs extra steps

5. PaddleOCR

• Best for: open-source OCR with better modern accuracy than Tesseract in many cases
• Pros: strong for images, multilingual support, can be self-hosted
• Cons: more setup complexity; PDF support usually requires converting pages to images first

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My recommendation

• If you want fastest path to reliable production OCR:
  Google Document AI or AWS Textract
• If you want self-hosted and low cost:
  PaddleOCR (or Tesseract if you want simplest)
• If you need structured extraction from forms/invoices/receipts:
  AWS Textract or Azure Document Intelligence

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Practical architecture for your workflow

A common setup is:

1. User uploads PDF/image
2. Store original file in object storage
3. Detect file type:
   • PDF → render pages to images or send directly to OCR service if supported
   • image → send directly
4. Run OCR asynchronously
5. Save extracted text + page-level results + confidence scores
6. Optionally post-process:
   • language detection
   • cleanup
   • searchable PDF generation
   • metadata extraction

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Simple rule of thumb

• Need accuracy and simplicity? Use a cloud OCR API.
• Need local/self-hosted? Use PaddleOCR.
• Need tables/forms? Use Textract or Document AI.

If you tell me:

1. your cloud preference,
2. expected monthly volume,
3. whether you need tables/forms/handwriting,

I can recommend the best exact stack for your workflow.