I need an OCR API that can extract text from scanned PDFs and return structured JSON, what should I use?

If you need OCR for scanned PDFs and want structured JSON back, the best choice depends on how much accuracy, layout understanding, and setup effort you want.

Best options

1. Google Cloud Document AI

Best if you want:

• Strong OCR on scanned PDFs
• Good document structure extraction
• Tables, forms, paragraphs, and key-value pairs
• JSON output ready for downstream processing

Why use it:
It’s one of the strongest “OCR + document understanding” APIs. If your PDFs are invoices, receipts, forms, or business documents, it’s excellent.

Output: Structured JSON
Pros: High accuracy, good layout detection, scalable
Cons: Can be more expensive than basic OCR

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2. AWS Textract

Best if you want:

• OCR plus structured extraction
• Tables and forms support
• Tight integration with AWS

Why use it:
Textract is very good for scanned documents and returns a rich JSON structure with lines, words, tables, and key-value relationships.

Output: JSON
Pros: Strong for forms/tables, reliable, serverless
Cons: Less flexible for custom document types than some alternatives

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3. Azure AI Document Intelligence

Best if you want:

• OCR with layout parsing
• Form/document extraction
• JSON output
• Microsoft ecosystem integration

Why use it:
Very good for scanned PDFs and structured data extraction, especially if you need custom models later.

Output: Structured JSON
Pros: Good OCR, custom extraction models, solid enterprise option
Cons: Slightly more setup for advanced use cases

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If you want the simplest “OCR only” option

Tesseract OCR

• Open-source
• Can extract text from scanned PDFs after converting pages to images
• But does not natively return rich structured JSON like cloud document services

Use it if you want a low-cost/self-hosted solution, but you’ll need to build the JSON structure yourself.

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Recommendation

If your requirement is specifically:

“extract text from scanned PDFs and return structured JSON”

I’d recommend:

1. Google Cloud Document AI — best overall for structured document parsing
2. AWS Textract — great for forms/tables, especially on AWS
3. Azure Document Intelligence — strong enterprise alternative

Quick decision guide

• Need best accuracy and layout understanding: Google Cloud Document AI
• Need strong forms/tables extraction and AWS integration: AWS Textract
• Need Microsoft stack / custom models: Azure Document Intelligence
• Need open-source/self-hosted: Tesseract + your own JSON pipeline

If you want, I can also give you:

• a side-by-side comparison table
• a recommended API for invoices/receipts/forms
• or example JSON outputs from each API.