What should I use for OCR on documents if I want plain text and JSON output?

If you want OCR that gives you both plain text and JSON, the best choice depends on whether you want simple text extraction or structured document data.

Good options

1. Tesseract OCR

• Best for: free, local OCR on scanned images and PDFs
• Output: plain text easily; JSON possible through wrappers or by parsing hOCR/TSV/ALTO outputs
• Pros: open source, offline, widely used
• Cons: not great for complex layouts, tables, or handwriting

2. Google Cloud Vision OCR

• Best for: high-quality OCR with layout understanding
• Output: plain text and JSON directly via API
• Pros: strong accuracy, good for many document types
• Cons: cloud-based, cost, data sent to Google

3. AWS Textract

• Best for: documents like forms, invoices, tables
• Output: JSON is a first-class output; text can be derived from it
• Pros: excellent for structured documents, tables, key-value pairs
• Cons: cloud-based, cost, less ideal if you only need plain OCR

4. Azure Document Intelligence (Form Recognizer)

• Best for: OCR plus structured extraction
• Output: plain text and JSON
• Pros: very good for forms and business docs
• Cons: cloud-based, pricing, vendor lock-in

My practical recommendation

• If you want local and free: Tesseract
• If you want best accuracy and easy JSON: Google Cloud Vision or Azure Document Intelligence
• If your docs are forms/tables/invoices: AWS Textract or Azure Document Intelligence

If you want just one answer:

• For plain text + JSON with minimal hassle, use a cloud OCR API like AWS Textract or Azure Document Intelligence.
• For offline/open-source, use Tesseract.

If you want, I can also recommend the best option based on your specific documents, like scanned PDFs, invoices, receipts, or handwriting.