PaddleOCR

PaddleOCR is Baidu's open-source toolkit that turns PDFs and images into structured text, Markdown and JSON.

PaddleOCR is an optical character recognition and document-AI toolkit from the PaddlePaddle project. PP-OCRv6 reads scene and document text in more than 100 languages, with one unified model covering 50 of them, including Chinese, English, Japanese and 46 Latin-script languages. PP-StructureV3 converts complex PDFs and images to Markdown or JSON and keeps table-cell and text coordinates. PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 is a 0.9B vision-language model for document parsing, scored at 96.3% on OmniDocBench v1.6 in the project's figures. Dify, RAGFlow and Cherry Studio are named as users. It is meant for both edge and cloud deployments.

PaddleOCR at a glance

Best for: Software engineer, Researcher
Runs on: open source
Pricing: Free and open source
Released: May 2020
Category: AI productivity tool
Website: github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

Key features

PP-OCRv6 scene and document text recognition
100+ languages, with one model for 50 of them
PP-StructureV3 conversion of PDFs and images to Markdown or JSON
PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 document vision-language model
Table, formula and seal recognition
Coordinates for text and table cells

Use it for

Turn scanned PDFs into Markdown for a RAG index
Read IDs, street signs or industrial labels
Extract tables from invoices while keeping cell positions

Alternatives to PaddleOCR

MiniCPM OCR — Efficient document parsing with correctness assessment and high throughput.
Docling — Provides advanced PDF understanding and local execution for sensitive data.
OpenDataLoader PDF — It ranks first in benchmarks for layout and table extraction without needing a GPU.
docTR — Extracts text and layout details from documents using deep learning.
PaddleX — Provides standardized APIs and workflows for end-to-end model development.
PDF Inspector — Detects if a PDF is scanned or text-based to avoid unnecessary OCR costs.
LLM-Aided OCR — It combines Tesseract OCR with local or cloud LLMs to correct errors and format documents.
Sparrow — Extracts structured data locally from documents without cloud dependencies.
deepdoctection — Orchestrates layout analysis, OCR, and model fine-tuning in PyTorch pipelines.
Chandra — Provides precise document parsing with bounding box data for complex layouts.
MinerU — Parses complex documents and tables into structured markdown for agents.
Sygal — Local conversion with no subscriptions keeps all sensitive documents secure.

All PaddleOCR alternatives