PaddleOCR
A widely used open-source OCR toolkit supporting many languages and document layouts.
PaddleOCR is a mature OCR toolkit from Baidu's PaddlePaddle ecosystem. It covers text detection and recognition across many languages, plus document layout analysis and table and formula recognition.
It is a long-standing, well-supported project and a common base layer for turning scanned and image documents into text.
Where it fits
A fit when the core problem is OCR (extracting text from scans and images) across multiple languages.
Where it does not fit
An OCR engine, not an end-to-end RAG ingestion pipeline: you build the surrounding steps yourself.
Alternatives to PaddleOCR
The closest options on the map, and where each fits instead.
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Surya OCR toolkit
A fit when you want modern, multilingual OCR with strong layout and reading-order detection.
Unlike PaddleOCR Maturity: growing
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MinerU Document parser
A fit when source PDFs are technical or scientific and formulas and tables must survive the conversion.
Unlike PaddleOCR Maturity: growing
Pairs with
Commonly used alongside it.
