Surya
7.3#9 in ocr softwareFrom $400 a monthFree planAPILinuxmacOSSelf-hosted
VisitSurya vs Tesseract OCR
Tesseract OCR
7.9#2 in ocr softwareFree planFree planAndroidAPILinuxmacOS
VisitWhat both publish
| Fact | Surya | Tesseract OCR |
|---|---|---|
| Installation | The README installs Surya with pip install surya-ocr and lists Docker plus NVIDIA Container Toolkit for NVIDIA GPU use, or llama.cpp for CPU and Apple Silicon. | The documentation describes installation through Linux distributions, macOS package managers, Windows installers, and source builds. |
| Languages | The repository describes Surya as supporting OCR in 90+ languages. | The project says Tesseract supports UTF-8 and recognizes more than 100 languages out of the box. |
| License | The Surya code is Apache 2.0, while the model weights use a modified AI Pubs Open Rail-M license with commercial-use conditions described in the README. | The code is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and is provided without warranties under the license terms. |
| Primary platform | desktop | desktop |
| Purpose | Surya is a 650M-parameter OCR model for text recognition, layout analysis, reading order, and table recognition. | Tesseract is an OCR engine and command-line program for extracting printed text from images. |
| Support | Datalab lists community support on Free, email and Slack support on Team, and dedicated support on Enterprise. | 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 |
Surya plans
- FreeFree
- Team$400 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Tesseract OCR plans
- Tesseract OCRFree
Pick Surya if…
Surya suits developers and teams building document OCR workflows who can provide a supported inference backend. It is less suited to photo or natural-scene recognition, which is outside its stated specialization.
Pick Tesseract OCR if…
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.