OCRmyPDF

7.9easy start · #4 of 40
in OCR software

Runs on api, Linux, Mac, self-hosted, Windows.

OCRmyPDF is ranked #4 of 40 in OCR software on The Geeks Club. It runs on API, Linux, macOS, Self-hosted, Windows. There is a free plan.

OCRmyPDF plans and pricing

OCRmyPDF Free Free software; self-hosted installation; depends on external OCR and PDF tools ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io · 2 Oct 2026

PaddleOCR 0 of 4 in the starter kit Lesson 18.6 FreeOCR.AI 0 of 4 in the starter kit Lesson 28.1 Tesseract OCR 0 of 4 in the starter kit Lesson 37.9 i2OCR 0 of 4 in the starter kit Lesson 57.8 Prizmo 0 of 4 in the starter kit Lesson 67.8 ABBYY FineReader PDF 0 of 4 in the starter kit Lesson 77.4

Searchable PDF: Yes
Primary platform: desktop
Supported inputs: pdf
Purpose: OCRmyPDF adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDF files while preserving the original PDF as much as possible.
OCR engine: It uses Tesseract to recognize text in PDF page images.
PDF/A: By default, OCRmyPDF generates PDF/A-2b archival PDFs, and users can select regular PDF output instead.
Image processing: It offers image processing options such as deskew to improve visual quality and OCR accuracy.
Existing text: Its processing modes can error on existing text, skip such pages, redo OCR, or force OCR across all pages.
API and plugins: OCRmyPDF can be used as a Python library and supports plugins that customize processing steps.
Installations: The documentation provides installation methods for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and Docker.
Integrations: The documentation identifies Paperless-ngx and Nextcloud OCR as third-party integrations that use OCRmyPDF.
Security: The project advises using OCRmyPDF only with PDFs users trust and says its Docker web service example has no security measures and is not intended for public internet deployment.
OCR accuracy: The documentation notes that OCR accuracy may trail commercial solutions, handwriting is not recognized, and poor scans can produce poor results.
Language support: Results may be poor when a document contains languages not specified in the language argument.
Price from: Free

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