I Spent May Evaluating Different Engines for OCR

An extensive experiment evaluated fourteen different Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines on ninety-three challenging documents to determine if cheaper tools could replace expensive APIs. The test included a wide range of contenders, from classic open-source options like Tesseract to powerful, general vision-language models like Gemini Flash. While no single engine excelled at everything, Gemini Flash emerged as the best all-around performer for mixed and messy documents, with Tesseract remaining a strong, free choice for simpler tasks. The main takeaway is that businesses can significantly reduce costs by classifying documents first and routing them to the most appropriate engine based on complexity and cost.