OCR4all
6.9#20 in ocr softwareFree planFree planWebLinuxmacOSSelf-hosted
Visit| Fact | OCR4all | Tesseract OCR |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2019 | 1985 |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| License | OCR4all is released under the MIT License. | The code is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and is provided without warranties under the license terms. |
| Primary platform | both | desktop |
| Purpose | OCR4all provides a workflow for recognizing historical printed and handwritten material, with user interaction at workflow stages to improve results. | Tesseract is an OCR engine and command-line program for extracting printed text from images. |
| Recognition engine | The product page describes text recognition as being carried out with Calamari. | Tesseract 4 and later include an LSTM-based engine focused on line recognition and retain a legacy character-pattern engine. |
| Support | The team page identifies a user support contact, Florian Langhanki, with a University of Würzburg email address. | The README directs users to documentation, FAQs, user and developer forums, past issues, and mailing lists, and says issues should be used for bug reports rather than questions. |
| Supported inputs | both | image |
It suits researchers, archivists, and other users working with historical print or handwriting who want an interactive workflow. Its documentation specifically addresses non-technical users.
Tesseract OCR suits developers building image-text recognition into applications, as well as desktop users who need searchable PDFs. It is not suited to handwriting OCR.