What OCR API should I use for scanned documents?

It depends on what you need most: accuracy, layout handling, cost, speed, and whether you want cloud or self-hosted.

Best OCR APIs by common use case

1. Google Cloud Vision OCR

Best for: general-purpose OCR, strong baseline accuracy, fast setup
Good if you need:

• Printed text extraction from scans/photos
• Multi-language support
• Simple integration

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Good accuracy on clean scans
• Solid language support

Cons:

• Can be weaker on complex document layout than specialized doc OCR tools

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2. AWS Textract

Best for: scanned forms, invoices, receipts, structured documents
Good if you need:

• Key-value extraction
• Tables
• Forms and fields

Pros:

• Excellent for documents with structure
• Extracts tables and form data
• Good for automation workflows

Cons:

• Less ideal if you only need plain text OCR
• Output can be more complex to work with

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3. Azure AI Document Intelligence (Form Recognizer)

Best for: enterprise document processing, forms, invoices, contracts
Good if you need:

• OCR plus layout/document understanding
• Prebuilt models for common document types
• Custom extraction models

Pros:

• Strong document analysis
• Good for enterprise workflows
• Handles layouts well

Cons:

• Can be more involved to configure than basic OCR

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4. ABBYY FineReader / ABBYY Vantage

Best for: highest OCR quality, especially on difficult scans
Good if you need:

• Very accurate OCR
• Complex layouts
• Historical or noisy scans

Pros:

• Often considered top-tier for OCR quality
• Strong on tough documents

Cons:

• Typically more expensive
• Enterprise-focused

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5. Tesseract OCR

Best for: open-source, self-hosted, low-cost solutions
Good if you need:

• Full control
• No per-page API costs
• On-prem deployment

Pros:

• Free and open source
• Can be customized
• No cloud dependency

Cons:

• Usually less accurate out of the box than commercial APIs
• Needs more tuning for best results

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Quick recommendation

• Need simple text OCR for scanned docs? → Google Vision
• Need forms/tables/invoices extraction? → AWS Textract or Azure Document Intelligence
• Need highest accuracy on messy scans? → ABBYY
• Need self-hosted/open source? → Tesseract

If you want one default choice

For most scanned documents, I’d start with:

• Azure AI Document Intelligence if you need layout-aware document processing
• Google Cloud Vision if you mostly need straightforward OCR text extraction
• AWS Textract if your documents contain tables/forms and you want structured output

If you tell me:

1. document type (receipts, contracts, invoices, books, forms),
2. whether you need tables/key-value pairs,
3. volume per month,
4. cloud vs on-prem,

…I can recommend the best specific API for your case.