I'm building a workflow that needs OCR for invoices and receipts, what should I use?

For invoices and receipts, you usually want OCR + document understanding, not plain OCR alone.

Best options by need

1) If you want the easiest, most accurate out-of-the-box:

• Google Document AI
• AWS Textract
• Azure AI Document Intelligence

These are good if you need:

• text extraction
• line items
• key fields like vendor, date, total, tax
• tables and forms
• decent handwriting support in some cases

2) If you want open-source / self-hosted:

• PaddleOCR
• Tesseract
  • Tesseract is lightweight but weaker on messy receipts
  • PaddleOCR is generally better for modern production use

Open-source is good if you need:

• full control
• on-prem deployment
• lower cost at scale
• custom pipeline building

3) If you need invoice-specific parsing:

Use a specialized extraction layer on top of OCR, such as:

• Document AI invoice parser
• Textract AnalyzeExpense
• Azure prebuilt invoice model

These are better than generic OCR because invoices/receipts have structure.

My recommendation

• Start with AWS Textract / Google Document AI / Azure Document Intelligence
• Choose based on your cloud stack:
  • AWS → Textract
  • Google Cloud → Document AI
  • Azure → Document Intelligence

If you’re building your own pipeline

A common workflow is:

1. image/PDF preprocessing
2. OCR
3. layout/table detection
4. field extraction
5. validation/business rules

Quick rule of thumb

• Simple text extraction: Tesseract or PaddleOCR
• Invoices/receipts in production: cloud document AI service
• High volume + custom control: PaddleOCR + your own parser

If you want, I can recommend the best option based on your:

• cloud provider
• budget
• need for line items
• on-prem vs cloud
• expected document quality