Free Software Collection
Free OCR Tools
Online OCR sites stack three problems: a daily page limit, a sign-up, and your image travelling to their server. For contracts, identity documents, medical records or internal paperwork, the third is a problem by itself — you cannot verify where that image went afterwards. Local OCR removes all three at once: offline, unlimited, and nothing leaves the machine. This list follows the workflow in three stages — pulling text off the screen, turning scans into searchable documents, and filing documents into a searchable archive.
4 curated recommendations
Selection Criteria
- Recognition happens locally; no image is uploaded anywhere.
- No cap on the number of recognitions or pages.
- No account or API key required.
- Support for non-Latin scripts is noted per tool.
Recommended Tools
Umi-OCR
Screenshot-to-text entirely on your machine — unlimited, no account
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
OCRmyPDF
Adds an invisible text layer to scanned PDFs so they become searchable
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
Paperless-ngx
Scan the paper in once, then search for it instead of digging through drawers
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Cross-platform
Stirling-PDF
A self-hosted all-in-one PDF toolbox
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- No Sign-up
FAQ
- What pulls text out of a screenshot?
- Umi-OCR. A shortcut selects any region of the screen and the text lands in the clipboard, working on pages that block copying, on PDFs and on video frames, across Latin and CJK scripts including vertical text, entirely offline. Windows and Linux only.
- My scanned PDF is not searchable.
- Run OCRmyPDF over it. It slips a transparent text layer under the images, leaving the page identical while making it searchable, selectable, copyable and indexable. It is a command-line tool — one command per file, and a loop makes it hundreds. Non-English needs the matching Tesseract language pack installed first.
- I want to digitise a pile of paper documents.
- Paperless-ngx. Feed scans in and it runs OCR, applies tags by rule, and stores everything as a full-text searchable library, so the warranty slip from three years ago is a keyword away. It is a self-hosted service and wants a machine that stays on.
- Why not just use an online OCR site?
- Recognition quality is not the main issue; where the data goes is. Once an employment contract or a scan of an identity document is uploaded, how long it is retained, who can see it and whether it feeds training are all unverifiable from your side. Running locally removes the question entirely.