Which OCR Engines are free to use in 2025?

[lingi]

Hi All,

I’m working on automating data extraction from the viewer screen of Alaris Capture Pro, specifically trying to extract handwritten text to assist with indexing.

Could anyone advise which OCR engines are free to use within UiPath for this purpose in 2025? I’m aware there is built in OCR engine like Tesseract and UiPath Document OCR.

Thanks in advance!

[prashant1603765 (Prashant Kumar)]

Hi @lingi

Pls check below link,

Which OCR engines are free?

I cannot for the life of me find which of these OCR engines are free and which are not. I’m seeing different answers being marked as correct here on the forum, and I cannot find any official UiPath documentation that explicitly lays out which are free and which aren’t. Is Tesseract free? (I think so…) Is Microsoft OCR free? (I think so…) Is Microsoft Azure OCR free? (Not sure, but I think it is…) Is Omnipage OCR? (Not sure, but I don’t think so…)

If helpful, mark as solution. Happy automation with UiPath

[ashokkarale]

@lingi

We have only Tesseract OCR & UiPath Document OCR are free and should be sufficient for your use case.

[lingi]

Hi @prashant1603765 thanks for the link. will check it out!

Hello @ashokkarale, thank you for the reply! Could I check if UiPath Document OCR are free for commercial use? I tried using UiPath Document OCR in Get OCR Text but encounter the following error: UiPathOCRException: InvalidReponse - not sure if i need any API key.

[rkelchuri (ER.Krishna)]

@lingi , I recommend developing your own OCR engine using Python and the Tesseract library. You can package this engine as an executable (.exe) file and integrate it with UiPath to extract and read your data.

This approach is both efficient and license-free. Please let me know if you require further details or assistance

[marian.platonov]

This is a sample Studio project that allows to interact with tesseract.exe installed on the robot VM.

RotateImageInPython.zip (534.0 KB)

The only thing that you need is modify the Python code to allow the text extraction and change in Studio project the called function under the Invoke Python Method.

[rkelchuri (ER.Krishna)]

This approach is also good idea, in some environments custom python code is restricted. In such scenario, convert this python code into exe and call that exe by using start process from UiPath. This approach does not required any python environment to execute python code.