The most cost-effective OCR or document processing solution will, of course, depend on the specific requirements and needs of your use case, including the volume of documents to be processed, as well as the level of accuracy and the turnaround time that are required.
The main players in the RPA field, including Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism, and WorkFusion all offer OCR capabilities to extract data from scanned documents, images, and PDF files, and they offer free trials or limited Community (free) editions except for WorkFusion.
Outside of the full RPA solutions, there are other OCR and document processing.
Google Cloud Vision offers a pay-as-you-go model, which can be cost-effective for small to medium-sized organizations. It offers an initial tier of OCR processing for free.
Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services provides OCR and document processing capabilities, including text recognition, form processing, and handwriting recognition with a range of pricing plans, including a free tier for small-scale testing and development, as well as pay-as-you-go and subscription-based options. The first tier makes the services available at $1 per 1,000 transactions for up to one million transactions.
Amazon enters the fray with Textract, its cloud-based OCR and document processing service that provides text and data extraction from scanned documents and images. Like the other big cloud providers, it has a pay-as-you-go pricing scheme, as well as a free tier that lasts for three months. During that time you can use, for example, its Detect Document Text API for up to 1,000 pages per month.
Abbyy FlexiCapture can be run on-premises or in the cloud and provides OCR and document processing. Its OCR recognizes printed text in up to 200 languages. With its OCR API, prices start at $29.99 per month for processing of up to 500 pages in that month, while up to 5,000 pages in a month would cost $199.99.
And Tesseract OCR is a free, open-source OCR engine that can be integrated into custom applications for text recognition and document processing. If you have the technical expertise and resources to develop and maintain custom OCR solutions, it can be a cost-effective option.
Find out what your peers are saying about UiPath, Microsoft, Automation Anywhere and others in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Updated: February 2025.
What is RPA? Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software technology that enables enterprises to build, deploy, and manage a virtual workforce made up of software robots (“bots”) that emulate the actions of humans in interactions with software and digital systems.
The most cost-effective OCR or document processing solution will, of course, depend on the specific requirements and needs of your use case, including the volume of documents to be processed, as well as the level of accuracy and the turnaround time that are required.
The main players in the RPA field, including Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism, and WorkFusion all offer OCR capabilities to extract data from scanned documents, images, and PDF files, and they offer free trials or limited Community (free) editions except for WorkFusion.
Outside of the full RPA solutions, there are other OCR and document processing.
Google Cloud Vision offers a pay-as-you-go model, which can be cost-effective for small to medium-sized organizations. It offers an initial tier of OCR processing for free.
Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services provides OCR and document processing capabilities, including text recognition, form processing, and handwriting recognition with a range of pricing plans, including a free tier for small-scale testing and development, as well as pay-as-you-go and subscription-based options. The first tier makes the services available at $1 per 1,000 transactions for up to one million transactions.
Amazon enters the fray with Textract, its cloud-based OCR and document processing service that provides text and data extraction from scanned documents and images. Like the other big cloud providers, it has a pay-as-you-go pricing scheme, as well as a free tier that lasts for three months. During that time you can use, for example, its Detect Document Text API for up to 1,000 pages per month.
Abbyy FlexiCapture can be run on-premises or in the cloud and provides OCR and document processing. Its OCR recognizes printed text in up to 200 languages. With its OCR API, prices start at $29.99 per month for processing of up to 500 pages in that month, while up to 5,000 pages in a month would cost $199.99.
And Tesseract OCR is a free, open-source OCR engine that can be integrated into custom applications for text recognition and document processing. If you have the technical expertise and resources to develop and maintain custom OCR solutions, it can be a cost-effective option.
@Lee Wolfe The most cost－effective OCR or document processing will PAD (Power Automate for Desktop). You can OCR with RPA free.