Tesseract vs Marker
Both are alternatives to AWS Textract. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Marker vs Tesseract — same comparison, one verdict.
Tesseract
Thirty years old, Apache-2.0, and it runs absolutely everywhere.
Tesseract is the OCR engine most of the world's text extraction has quietly gone through, originally from HP, developed by Google for a decade, and Apache-2.0 throughout. It recognises over a hundred languages, has bindings for every language you might be writing in, and is packaged in every Linux distribution. Modern neural extractors beat it on complex layouts, but on clean scanned text it is fast, dependable and effectively free of dependencies — often the right tool precisely because it is boring.
Marker
The best PDF-to-Markdown quality here — check the licence first.
Marker converts PDFs to Markdown with the highest fidelity of anything in this list: it handles equations, code blocks, tables and multi-column layouts, and optionally uses an LLM pass to improve difficult sections. For academic papers and technical documents the output quality is noticeably ahead. The caveat we would rather state than have you find in a licence review: Marker is GPL-3.0 with an additional revenue condition from its maintainer, so organisations above a revenue threshold need a commercial licence. Free for research and for smaller organisations, but not unconditionally.
Side by side
| Tesseract | Marker | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 95 | 70 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 with commercial revenue condition |
| Pricing | Free, Apache-2.0. | Free below the maintainer's revenue threshold; a commercial licence is required above it. |
Tesseract edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Tesseract
Strengths
- +Over a hundred languages, bindings for everything
- +Extremely mature and stable — decades of production use
- +Packaged everywhere; trivial to install and deploy
- +Apache-2.0 with no dependency weight
Trade-offs
- −Weak on complex layouts, multi-column pages and tables
- −Needs image pre-processing for good results on poor scans
- −No document understanding — it gives you text, not structure
Marker
Strengths
- +Best PDF-to-Markdown fidelity of the options here
- +Handles equations, code blocks and complex tables well
- +Optional LLM pass for difficult pages
- +Runs entirely locally
Trade-offs
- −Not unconditionally open source — revenue-gated commercial terms
- −GPL-3.0 copyleft affects how you can distribute derived work
- −GPU strongly recommended for reasonable throughput
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-11. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.