Tesseract vs Google Cloud Vision OCR
Tesseract is cheaper per page; Tesseract is faster; only Google Cloud Vision OCR supports handwriting, bounding boxes, confidence.
Tesseracttesseract/tesseract | Google Cloud Vision OCRgoogle/cloud-vision | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | OCR API |
| Price | Free | 2 credits / page |
| Per 1,000 pages | $0.00 | $2.00 |
| Typical speed | 0.6 s / page | 1.0 s / page |
| Best for | Clean printed text, free | Photos and simple scans |
| Inputs | PDF, images | PDF, images |
| Languages | 100+ languages | 100+ languages |
| Max pages per request | 500 | 2,000 |
| Tables | No | No |
| Handwriting | No | ✓ Yes |
| Math | No | No |
| Bounding boxes | No | ✓ Yes |
| Confidence | No | ✓ Yes |
| 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
Google Cloud Vision OCR
Google Cloud's image OCR with text and document text detection, word boxes and confidence.
Google Cloud Vision OCR detailsUse one, fall back to the other
Request body
{
"model": "tesseract/tesseract",
"fallbacks": ["google/cloud-vision"],
"file_url": "https://example.com/document.pdf"
}