Alternatives to olmOCR
Open-source toolkit that uses a vision language model to turn PDFs and scans into Markdown. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
olmOCR
Open-source toolkit that uses a vision language model to turn PDFs and scans into Markdown.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as olmOCR.
Marker
An open-source tool that converts PDFs and other documents to Markdown, JSON and HTML.
Marker also converts PDFs to Markdown with tables and equations, runs on CPU, GPU or Apple MPS, but its model weights have a separate licence.
MinerU
A document parser that converts PDFs, Office files and scans into Markdown and JSON.
MinerU converts PDFs, Office files and scans to Markdown and JSON with several local backends from ONNX to vLLM, under a non-standard licence.
PaddleOCR
OCR toolkit that turns PDFs and images into structured data.
PaddleOCR parses layout, tables and formulas into JSON and Markdown on Windows, macOS and Linux, built on PaddlePaddle with mostly Chinese documentation.
MarkItDown
Python command-line tool that converts PDFs, Office files and other documents into Markdown.
MarkItDown is a lightweight MIT-licensed Python tool converting PDFs and Office files to Markdown without a GPU, but it is not aimed at high-fidelity or scanned input.
Tesseract OCR
The open-source OCR engine behind most free text recognition tools.
Tesseract is a classic OCR engine with over a hundred languages that outputs text or searchable PDFs, but not Markdown, and needs manual image preprocessing.
EasyOCR
Python OCR library covering more than eighty languages out of the box.
EasyOCR is a Python OCR library covering eighty languages that returns text with bounding boxes, not structured Markdown, and is slow without a GPU.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
PDFMathTranslate
An AI tool that translates scientific PDFs while keeping formulas, charts and layout intact.
Poppler
PDF rendering library with pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo tools.
K2pdfopt
A tool that reflows and resizes PDF and DjVu files for reading on e-readers and phones.
