Which is cheaper, Tesseract or Surya?

Tesseract. Tesseract is free and Surya is 2 credits / page.

Which is more accurate?

It depends on the document. Tesseract is strongest at clean printed text, free, and Surya at layout and line-level ocr. Run a few of your own files through both and compare the output.

Yes. Put one as model and the other in fallbacks. If the first fails, the second reads the page, and you pay only for the one that answered.

Tesseract vs Surya

Tesseract is cheaper per page; Tesseract is faster; only Surya supports tables, bounding boxes.

Get API key All models

	Tesseract`tesseract/tesseract`	Surya`datalab/surya`
Type	Open source	Open source
Price	Free	2 credits / page
Per 1,000 pages	$0.00	$2.00
Typical speed	0.6 s / page	1.5 s / page
Best for	Clean printed text, free	Layout and line-level OCR
Inputs	PDF, images	PDF, images
Languages	100+ languages	90+ languages
Max pages per request	500	500
Tables	No	✓ Yes
Handwriting	No	No
Math	No	No
Bounding boxes	No	✓ Yes
Confidence	No	No
Forms	No	No
Multilingual	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
On OCRRouter	Available	Coming soon

Prices are what you pay on OCRRouter. Speed is the provider's typical figure, not a benchmark we ran.

What each one is

Tesseract

The classic open-source OCR engine. Plain text from clean printed scans.

Tesseract details

Surya

Open-source OCR toolkit with line detection, layout analysis, reading order and tables.

Surya details

Use one, fall back to the other

Request body

{
  "model": "tesseract/tesseract",
  "fallbacks": ["datalab/surya"],
  "file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}

Questions

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