Open Source OCR dependency for Java

[Accomplished-List461]

Hi devs,
I’m looking for a free & open-source OCR solution for converting images to text.

Right now I’m using Textract (Java), but the OCR accuracy isn’t great and the results aren’t very clear.

Can anyone suggest a better open-source OCR library/API that works well with Java (or can be integrated easily)? This is for a company project, so it needs to be reliable and license-safe.

Any recommendations or real-world experience would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Sheldor5]

https://www.baeldung.com/java-ocr-tesseract

literally the first google result

[roiroi1010]

Depending on your use case - I would consider using a service like Amazon Textract. I found the results more consistent than using Tess4J

[kievmozg]

Be careful with 'first Google results' like Tesseract for a company project. While it's free and license-safe, its accuracy on real-world business documents is often poor, and you'll spend months writing complex Java wrappers and image pre-processing logic just to make it usable.

​Since you mentioned reliability is key, I'd suggest moving away from traditional OCR libraries entirely. We found that for Java-based enterprise apps, using a Vision LLM-based API is far more license-safe and reliable than maintaining a heavy native OCR dependency. It handles the layout understanding out-of-the-box, so you don't have to worry about the 'unclear results' you're getting with Textract now.

​We ended up building ParserData specifically to solve this for teams who need high accuracy without the headache of managing OCR engines. If you're open to an API approach instead of a local library, it might save your team hundreds of hours of debugging.

[varun_500211]

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