What should I use for OCR on PDFs and images?

If you want a simple recommendation:

• Best general-purpose OCR for PDFs and images: Tesseract
  • Free, open source, widely used
  • Good for printed text
  • Works well in many languages
  • Best when images are clean and high quality

If you need better accuracy or easier setup, especially for messy scans:

• Commercial/cloud OCR
  • Google Cloud Vision OCR
  • AWS Textract
  • Azure Document Intelligence
  • Usually better on noisy scans, forms, tables, handwriting, and mixed layouts

If you want something that handles PDFs really well locally:

• OCRmyPDF
  • Great for scanned PDFs
  • Adds a text layer to PDFs
  • Often paired with Tesseract
  • Very practical if your goal is searchable PDFs

Quick guide:

• Scanned PDFs you want searchable: OCRmyPDF + Tesseract
• Images with printed text: Tesseract
• Forms, tables, or complex documents: AWS Textract or Azure Document Intelligence
• Highest accuracy and least hassle: a cloud OCR service

If you tell me:

1. whether your files are mostly PDFs or images,
2. whether the text is clean, scanned, or handwritten, and
3. whether you want local/open-source or cloud,

I can recommend the best exact toolchain.