P
PaddleOCR
Description
PaddleOCR is an open toolkit that turns images and PDFs into text and structured output (JSON or Markdown). It covers two tasks: recognizing text in photos and scans, and parsing whole documents with tables and formulas. For documents it offers a small vision-language model (PaddleOCR-VL) and a structure pipeline (PP-StructureV3) that also gives table cell coordinates. The authors say it supports more than 100 languages. It runs on Python 3.8 to 3.12 on Linux, Windows and macOS, on a CPU or on NVIDIA GPUs and other accelerators. The code is under Apache-2.0. An online demo is available on the project site.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Apache-2.0 license, commercial use allowed
- More than 100 languages, per the authors
- Works on a plain CPU as well as on GPUs
- Both simple text recognition and full document parsing with tables and formulas
Cons
- A set of tools to install and configure, not a ready app
- Handwriting is not listed among its features
Key facts
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Commercial use
- Allowed
- Hardware requirements
- Runs on CPU or on NVIDIA GPU and other accelerators (per the authors)
- Developer
- PaddlePaddle
- Checked on
- Oct 20, 2026
Editorial score
How strongly the AI Expertise editors recommend this open model for each of its tasks right now, on a 0–10 scale. The score combines output quality, capabilities, ease of launch, license openness and freshness.