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The AI stack

The whole five-layer mapL3InfrastructureL4Models & toolingL5Applications

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How we rank & score
Best of · 5 tools ranked

The best Document AI & OCR

Every option ranked — open-source, self-hostable, and commercial — by our transparent Sovereignty Score, with honest trade-offs so you choose what fits you, not us.

Extracting structure from PDFs, scans and forms — the unglamorous first step of most RAG pipelines. Cloud OCR bills per page, which turns a one-off corpus ingest into a four-figure invoice surprisingly fast.

L4Models & tooling — layer 4 of the AI stack
  1. 1

    Docling

    Top pickOpen source

    IBM's document converter. Layout-aware PDF to clean Markdown, MIT.

    Free, MIT. Runs on your own hardware, CPU or GPU. · in our AWS Textract comparison →

    94
    sovereignty
    What is Docling? →
  2. 2

    Tesseract

    Open source

    Thirty years old, Apache-2.0, and it runs absolutely everywhere.

    Free, Apache-2.0. · in our AWS Textract comparison →

    95
    sovereignty
    What is Tesseract? →
  3. 3

    PaddleOCR

    Open source

    The strongest open OCR engine, and the best at non-Latin scripts.

    Free, Apache-2.0. · in our AWS Textract comparison →

    92
    sovereignty
    What is PaddleOCR? →
  4. 4

    Unstructured

    Open source

    One interface for every document format you will actually be handed.

    Open library free under Apache-2.0; a paid hosted API is offered separately. · in our AWS Textract comparison →

    90
    sovereignty
    What is Unstructured? →
  5. 5

    Marker

    Commercial

    The best PDF-to-Markdown quality here — check the licence first.

    Free below the maintainer's revenue threshold; a commercial licence is required above it. · in our AWS Textract comparison →

    70
    sovereignty
    What is Marker? →

Replacing a specific tool?

Head-to-head comparisons for each popular document ai & ocr product.

Alternatives to AWS Textract

5 vetted options · top pick Docling

Straight head-to-heads

Two document ai & ocr tools, side by side — verified facts and a plain verdict.

Docling vs Tesseract→Docling vs PaddleOCR→Docling vs Unstructured→Docling vs Marker→Tesseract vs PaddleOCR→Tesseract vs Unstructured→Tesseract vs Marker→PaddleOCR vs Unstructured→PaddleOCR vs Marker→Unstructured vs Marker→
The Macrostack brief

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