I’m unhappy with Azure Document Intelligence for handwriting, what else should I try?

If Azure Document Intelligence isn’t giving you good handwriting results, a few alternatives are worth trying depending on what kind of handwriting you have:

Strong alternatives

1. Google Cloud Vision OCR

   • Often solid for general handwriting on scanned docs and photos.
   • Good first alternative if you want a cloud API and quick testing.

2. Amazon Textract

   • Better for forms, tables, and structured documents.
   • Handwriting support exists, but quality varies; still worth testing if your docs are business forms.

3. ABBYY FineReader / ABBYY FlexiCapture

   • Often one of the best commercial OCR options for challenging documents.
   • Strong enterprise tooling, but can be pricier.

4. Nanonets

   • Good for document extraction workflows and custom models.
   • Useful if your handwriting is in a fairly consistent format.

5. Mathpix

   • Excellent if the handwriting is technical, especially math, science, or mixed handwritten text.
   • Less general-purpose, but very strong in its niche.

Open-source / self-hosted options

6. PaddleOCR

   • Good open-source OCR stack, improving fast.
   • Worth testing if you want more control and lower cost.

7. TrOCR / Hugging Face models

   • Transformer-based handwriting recognition models can work well, especially for line-level or word-level recognition.
   • Better if you can fine-tune on your own examples.

8. Kraken or Calamari

   • Useful for historical documents and custom handwriting recognition.
   • More setup effort, but can outperform generic OCR on specialized handwriting.

Best choice depends on the handwriting

• Neat printed handwriting on forms → Google Vision, ABBYY, Textract
• Messy cursive → ABBYY, TrOCR fine-tuned, Kraken
• Forms/tables with handwriting → Textract, ABBYY FlexiCapture, Nanonets
• Technical handwritten notes → Mathpix
• Custom domain-specific handwriting → fine-tuned TrOCR or a custom model

Practical recommendation

If you want the fastest path, I’d try this order:

1. Google Cloud Vision OCR
2. ABBYY FineReader/FlexiCapture
3. Amazon Textract
4. TrOCR or PaddleOCR if you can tolerate model setup or want to fine-tune

If you want, I can also help you choose based on:

• whether your docs are forms, notes, receipts, or letters
• whether the handwriting is cursive or block print
• whether you need API-only, on-prem, or open-source options