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Scans to PDF vs Tesseract OCR: catalog facts
Scans to PDF	Tesseract OCR
Free Free and open source under the GPL-3.0-or-later licence.	Free Free and open source under the Apache licence.
Linux, Command line	Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line
Separate compression of text and background keeps scanned PDFs small Adds an invisible OCR layer so documents become searchable	Over a hundred languages, with trainable models Outputs searchable PDFs directly, not just text
Color and grayscale scans need preparation in other tools for good results Linux only	Accuracy depends heavily on image preprocessing you must do yourself No interface of its own; it is a command line engine
Downloadable app	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: GPL-3.0-or-later	License: Apache-2.0
No account needed	Not stated if an account is needed
Works offline	Not stated if it works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 1, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 22, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.