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
Docling
Top pickOpen sourceIBM'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 →
What is Docling? →94sovereignty - 2
Tesseract
Open sourceThirty years old, Apache-2.0, and it runs absolutely everywhere.
Free, Apache-2.0. · in our AWS Textract comparison →
What is Tesseract? →95sovereignty - 3
PaddleOCR
Open sourceThe strongest open OCR engine, and the best at non-Latin scripts.
Free, Apache-2.0. · in our AWS Textract comparison →
What is PaddleOCR? →92sovereignty - 4
Unstructured
Open sourceOne 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 →
What is Unstructured? →90sovereignty - 5
Marker
CommercialThe 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 →
What is Marker? →70sovereignty
Is it free?
The free tier, its real limits and where you start paying — read from each vendor's own pricing page and dated.
Run these yourself
What each one actually needs — real RAM, honest running cost, and the setup time nobody quotes.
- Self-hosting Docling 8 GB — the layout models are the memory cost
- Self-hosting Unstructured 8 GB with the high-resolution strategy
Replacing a specific tool?
Head-to-head comparisons for each popular document ai & ocr product.
Straight head-to-heads
Two document ai & ocr tools, side by side — verified facts and a plain verdict.