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Recommendations Libraries & SDKs

OCR & Document Extraction

Tools to pull text and structure out of images and PDFs — from in-browser OCR libraries to LLM-powered document extraction.

alternatives (4)

Mistral OCR

Best for: Complex documents

LLM-grade OCR that reads complex documents (tables, layouts) and returns clean structured text.

  • +Handles layout/tables
  • +High accuracy
  • API / paid

Tesseract.js

Best for: In-browser / offline OCR

Pure-JavaScript port of Tesseract that runs OCR directly in the browser or Node — no server needed.

  • +Runs client-side
  • +Free & open source
  • Weaker on messy scans

Unstructured

Best for: Docs → LLM/RAG pipelines

Pipeline for turning PDFs, images, and docs into clean, structured chunks ready for LLMs and RAG.

  • +Many file types
  • +RAG-ready output
  • Setup overhead

Unlimited-OCR

Best for: Open self-hosted OCR

Baidu's open OCR model for robust text recognition across documents and scenes — self-hostable, no per-page limits.

  • +Open source
  • +No usage caps
  • +Strong recognition
  • Needs GPU for best speed

Compare

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AlternativeTypeRunsFree tier
Mistral OCRLLM OCRAPILimited
Tesseract.jsClassic OCRBrowser / NodeYes
UnstructuredDoc extractionLibrary / APIYes
Unlimited-OCROpen OCR modelSelf-hostYes

For quick client-side text recognition, Tesseract.js runs entirely in the browser. For messy real-world documents with tables and layout, Mistral OCR is far more accurate. To feed documents into an LLM or RAG pipeline, Unstructured turns them into clean structured chunks.