What should I use for scanned document data extraction?

For scanned documents, you typically want an OCR + document extraction solution. The best choice depends on your needs:

Good options by use case

• Simple OCR for text only

  • Tesseract: free, open-source, good for basic text extraction.
  • Best if you just need to turn scans into searchable text and can tolerate some cleanup.

• Cloud document extraction with forms/tables

  • Google Document AI
  • AWS Textract
  • Azure AI Document Intelligence
  • Best if you want higher accuracy, layout understanding, tables, key-value pairs, and less engineering work.

• Custom extraction with workflow automation

  • ABBYY FlexiCapture / Vantage
  • Good for enterprise document workflows, invoices, IDs, claims, etc.

• Open-source + custom pipeline

  • PaddleOCR or docTR for OCR
  • Combine with LayoutParser or your own post-processing
  • Best if you need on-prem / lower cost / more control

Quick recommendation

• If you need production-quality extraction from scanned PDFs/images, start with:

  • AWS Textract for forms/tables and quick integration
  • Google Document AI for strong document understanding
  • Azure Document Intelligence if you’re already in Microsoft’s ecosystem

• If you need free/local

  • Tesseract or PaddleOCR

What matters most

Choose based on:

• Document type: invoices, receipts, contracts, forms, IDs?
• Need for tables/key-value pairs?
• Accuracy vs cost
• Cloud vs on-prem
• Volume and latency

If you tell me:

1. what kind of documents you have,
2. whether they’re handwritten or printed,
3. whether you need tables/fields or just text,

I can recommend the best specific tool.