Free Ocr Mac Software

  1. Free Ocr Reader For Mac
  2. Ocr Scanner software, free download
  1. The best free OCR software for Mac. #1 LEADTOOLS OCRApp. Compatibility: macOS 10.10 or later. Called OCR Scanner with LEADTOOLS SDK at the Mac App Store, OCRApp is an easy-to-use free. #2 PDF OCR X Community Edition. #3 Microsoft OneNote.
  2. Compare the best OCR software for Mac of 2021 for your business. Find the highest rated OCR software for Mac pricing, reviews, free demos, trials, and more.
Free

When converting scanned invoices, reports or images into editable formats, OCR is required. If you are looking for the best free OCR solutions for mac like many others, we collect a list for you: a list of 12 powerful mac free ocr software or online, free OCR services to perform satisfactory OCR on digitized files for 2021.

Full List of Mac Free OCR

PlatformInputOutput
1. PDF OCR X CommunityOfflinePDF and ImagePDF, Text
OfflinePDF and ImageText, Image
3. OneNote OCROfflinePDF and ImageText
4. OCR App by LEAD ToolsOfflinePDF and ImageText
5. Easy Screen OCR for MacOfflineScreenshotText
6. DigitEyeOCROfflineBMP and GIFText
7. Google DocsOnlinePDF and ImagePDF, Word, ODT, RTF, Text, HTML, ePub
OnlinePDF and ImageWord, Excel, Text
OnlinePDF and ImageWord, Excel, PPT, Text, ePub, HTML, etc.
OnlinePDF and ImageWord, Excel, Text, ePub, PPT, DjVu, etc.
OnlinePDF, Image and DjVuPDF, Word, Text
OnlinePDF and ImagePDF, Word, Text, RTF

Free Try on The Best Mac OCR Program

  • Perform OCR on scanned documents and images
  • OCR files and export as 10 editable formats
  • Advanced OCR settings to improve OCR accuracy
  • Batch OCR
  • Recognize 27~200 languages
  • High quality OCR results
Free Download

Free Ocr Reader For Mac

6 Best Free OCR Software for Mac in 2021

There are 2 types of free OCR solutions for Mac users, either online or offline. In this part, we list 6 top free OCR software for MacOS basing on text recognition accuracy and overall features.

Free OCR scan performed with different software can easily determine their relative efficiency and speed and save time, effort, and money for the enterprise by choosing the best. 23+ Best Omnichannel Commerce Software for Windows, Mac, Android 2021. EaseUS PDF Editor. EaseUS is known for its long-standing reputation, having started in the industry.

1. PDF OCR X Community

Best Free & Paid OCR đź’Ż. Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. Image Source: Adobe Acrobat. Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is a software that lets you convert PDF files to Word, Excel, and other. OmniPage Ultimate. Abbyy FineReader.

Free Ocr Mac Software

PDF OCR X Community is a simple drag-and-drop utility that converts single-page PDFs and images into text documents or searchable PDF files, it supports for more than 60 languages. For multi-page PDFs and batch conversion features, you need to pay its enterprise version.

Download Address: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pdf-ocr-x-community-edition/id571442933?mt=12

Advantages:

  1. Extremely easy to use;
  2. Support both PDF and image;
  3. Recognize 60 languages;

Disadvantages:

  1. Free edition only OCR single-page PDF;
  2. Formatting is messed up when working on complicate files;
  3. Relatively slow OCR process;

2. Evernote

Evernote is a popular note-syncing service, enables users to collect, nuture and share ideas across desktop and mobile platforms. One of its easily overlooked features is automatic OCR service. Users will be allowed to add images into Evernote server for automatic OCR, you may have to wait, but 10 minutes will be quite enough to finish the OCR.

Download Address: https://evernote.com/download

Advantages:

  1. Available for all platforms (MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android);
  2. Support both PDF and image;
  3. Recognize 28 languages;

Disadvantages:

  1. Limited OCR feature when dealing with PDF (file size, pages, resolution, etc.);
  2. Relatively slow OCR processing;

Evernote OCR review, how-to guide and troubleshooting

Evernote is one of the best and most popular cross-platform note-taking apps. In this article, you will find how to use Evernote OCR and what to do if Evernote OCR is not working.

READ MORE >

3. OneNote OCR

Microsoft OneNote is a program to take and manage notes anytime and anywhere. It greatly facilitates the collaborations between team members. Not only limited to manually input texts to create notes, Microsoft OneNote also embeds the OCR feature, OneNote OCR allowing users to recognize texts from images, so the image texts can be copied and paste as editable or searchable note.

Download Address: https://www.onenote.com/download

Advantages:

  1. Available for all platforms;
  2. Support both PDF and image;

Disadvantages:

  1. Can only copy text from PDF or image, no formatting is retained;
  2. OCR fails or crashes sometimes;

How to Do OneNote OCR on Image or PDF(Mac, Windows, iPad)

An impressive feature of OneNote is its built-in capability to do OneNote OCR. Here we are going to introduce OneNote OCR, demonstrate how to OCR image or PDF with OneNote.

READ MORE >

4. OCR App by LEADTOOLS

OCR App by LEADTOOLS is a MacOS application designed to recognize and extract texts from images. Also it offers a set of tools to improve the OCR accuracy, such as tweak OCR Engine Settings, flip, reverse, adjust binarization or brightness of the image. It can also perform OCR on scanned PDFs, but only export files as text. If you want o convert uploaded files to other format with LEADTOOLS, you will need to copy and paste to the text processor accordingly.

Ocr Scanner software, free download

Download Address: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/leadtools-ocr/id604393629?mt=12

Advantages:

  1. Easy to use;
  2. Advanced settings to improve OCR accuracy;
  3. Support both image and PDF;
  4. Fast OCR;

Disadvantages:

  1. Recognize only 5 languages;
  2. No formatting is retained, only text;

5. Easy Screen OCR for Mac

It is a light and simple Mac free OCR software to recognize texts from images. All you need to do is, capturing the screenshots of your file first, then performing OCR on the file to make the image text copyable. Also, it allows users to save the screenshot as PNG or PDF format. However, this free OCR software for mac only allows users to OCR 20 images for free.

Download Address: https://easyscreenocr.com/

Advantages:

  1. Easy to use;
  2. Small in size;
  3. Support to take screenshots from any files;

Disadvantages:

  1. Only 20 images can be processed with OCR;
  2. No formatting is retained;
  3. Unstable OCR accuracy;

6. DigitEyeOCR

Though DigitEyeOCR has discontinued to update for many years, for users who are using MacOS 10.10 and earlier, it is still worth a try. It is a free OCR software for mac to recognize texts from BMP and GIF images. If you want to do OCR on other image formats, you will need to convert the file to DigitEye OCR supported formats.

Download Address: https://digiteyeocr.en.softonic.com/mac

Disadvantages:

  1. Only support BMP and GIF;
  2. Unstable OCR accuracy;
  3. Relatively slow OCR process;
  4. No update for years;

6 Best online, free Services for Mac

Also, there are quite a lot of online, free OCR services for mac users, but not all of them can actually perform OCR or bring satisfactory OCR results. And here we pick 6 best free OCR tools online according to our OCR testing.

7. Google Docs

Google Docs is a service offered by Google to manage web-based documents, like creating, editing Word, Spreadsheets, presentations, even store them online for easy access on different devices. Users can perform Google OCR on images, scanned PDFs, it is fast with basically satisfactory results.

Advantages:

  1. Support images and PDF;
  2. Excellent support on output format (searchable PDF, Word, ODT, RTF, TXT, HTML, ePub);
  3. Edit files after OCR processing within Google Docs;

Disadvantages:

  1. Require several steps to finish the OCR;
  2. Unstable OCR accuracy;
  3. Take time to process OCR;

8. Online OCR

Online OCR is an online OCR service that can recognize the texts and characters from scanned files and images. It requires no software installation, what you need to do is upload the file (not exceeding size of 5MB) as guided, choose the language and output format(Word, Excel or Text), then 'Convert' to start the OCR process. Once finish, a download link will be offered to download the converted file.

Advantages:

  1. Support both image and PDF;
  2. Easy to use;
  3. Export files as Word, Excel and Text;
  4. Recognize 46 languages;

Disadvantages:

  1. Unstable OCR accuracy;
  2. Need to manually adjust formatting in the output file;
  3. Max file size limit 15 MB;

9. Online2PDF

Online2PDF is another online platform to manage PDF files, such as editing, compressing ,unlocking ,converting, merging, protecting and so on. Comparing with other online, free OCR tools, Online2pdf offers extended features to customize the output and support more output formats.

Advantages:

  1. Batch OCR;
  2. Support both image and PDF;
  3. Excellent support for output format;
  4. Allow customizing output files;

Disadvantages:

  1. File quantity and size limit;
  2. Recognize only 6 languages;
  3. Unstable OCR accuracy;

10. ConvertioOCR

Convertio is an online, free tool to OCR image and scanned documents, then save them as various editable formats. You can upload files from local or via url, even icloud storage accounts. It allows users to perform OCR on a multiple-language file.

Advantages:

  1. Upload files from local, URl or icloud storage services;
  2. Recognize multiple-language file;
  3. Excellent support for output formats (11 formats);
  4. Convert all or specific pages;
  5. Save converted files to Dropbox or Google Drive;

Disadvantages:

  1. Unstable OCR accuracy;
  2. Relatively slow OCR processs;
  3. Need to manually adjust the formatting;
  4. Only 10 pages can be done with OCR for free;

11. New OCR

New OCR can convert JPG, PNG, GIF, MBP, TIFF, PDF and DJVU files into Doc, TXT or PDF format. To improve the OCR accuracy, New OCR allows users to rotate images and analyze page layout before the OCR processing. If you want to export the files as other formats, you need to click the “Download” button at the bottom of its page to export.

Advantages:

  1. Support image, PDF and DjVu files;
  2. Export files as Word, Text and searchable PDF format;
  3. Allow to rotate or analyze page layout for more accurate OCR results;

Disadvantages:

  1. Unstable OCR accuracy;
  2. Fail to do OCR sometimes;

12. Free Online OCR

Free Online OCR is a free service enabling users to convert images, scanned PDFs into editable and searchable text, such as DOC, RTF,TXT or PDF. It will rotate the pages automatically for accurate OCR, you can get editable files with nice formatting.

Advantages:

  1. Support both image and PDF;
  2. Export files as Word, PDF, Text and RTF;

Disadvantages:

  1. Unstable OCR accuracy;
  2. Need to manually adjust formatting in the output file;

What if Mac Free OCR Tools Fall Short?

However, these online/free mac OCR tools are not suitable for all mac users, you may feel not satisfied in one way or another:

  1. There is a size limit of the files;
  2. It doesn’t support various input or output format;
  3. Risk of privacy leakages;
  4. The tool doesn’t support your expected language;
  5. The OCR result is not satisfied;
  6. It is feature limited;

......

As we all know, “free” means you cannot get everything you desire from the service, if you require higher than those free services can offer, you will need to pay. This is also true to OCR services.

Best Solution If Mac Free OCR Software/Service Not Working

Choices on paid professional OCR software for Mac users are large in quantity. But if you are looking for the one combining simplicity, versatility and affordability, Cisdem PDF Converter OCR is absolutely the best choice.

Cisdem PDF Converter OCR is a dedicated Mac OCR software to convert and create PDF, also perform OCR on scanned documents or images to make them editable & searchable. One thing makes Cisdem outperform its competitors is its high quality OCR performance:accurate OCR results and maintained original formatting.

Use Cisdem to OCR All Files Now

  • Convert PDF to 16 formats;
  • OCR scanned documents and images into Word, Excel, PPT, Keynote, Pages, etc;
  • Convert images;
  • Create PDF from virtually all documents;
  • Batch conversion;
  • High quality OCR and conversion results;
Free Download

Steps to Perform OCR on Files with Cisdem

  1. Add scanned PDF or image to Converter interface.
    Drag and drop, or click '+' to add files.
  2. Turn the OCR button ON, choose page range, file language and output format.
  3. Optional. Tweak the advanced OCR settings for more accurate results.
    Click the 'Settings' icon, a new interface will appear. You will find all the contents are marked as Texts, Images or Tables in different colorful boxes. If you want to output a part as table, remove the current mark box, click on 'Mark Tables' in the OCR applied zone, then drag a mark box to select the part you want to mark as Tables.
  4. Click “Convert” to start OCR.

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OCR or Optical Character Recognition is a technology that electronically or mechanically converts images of printed or hand-written text within photos or scanned documents into machine-encoded text.

In today’s digital age where everything needs to be in binary 0’s and 1’s for computing assistance, OCR platforms find a multitude of uses. Some of them being:

  • The Government uses it for automatic number plate recognition.
  • Airports use it for passport recognition and information extraction.
  • Businesses use it for data entry by scanning and processing cheques, invoices, and bank statements.

Top 5 free OCR software

Now you must be thinking about how you could get your hands on this state-of-the-art technology. Well, here’s my recommendation for the top 5 free OCR software you can use in 2021 to make your life simpler.

1. ABBYY FineReader PDF

Abby FineReader is an all-in-one PDF and OCR software platform designed to maximize your productivity. It allows you to digitize, retrieve, edit, protect and share all your documents from a single platform.

Pros:

  • Ability to scan pages without altering the original layout.
  • Extremely clear and easy to use interface
  • Exceptionally accurate even while dealing with complicated documents.

Cons:

  • Does not have handwriting recognition.
  • A lot of features can only be accessed by buying the premium version.

2. Nanonets OCR

Nanonets OCR is an AI-based OCR software that automates data capture for intelligent document processing of invoices, receipts, ID cards, and more. Nanonets uses advanced OCR, machine learning image processing, and deep learning to extract relevant information from unstructured data. It is fast, accurate, easy to use, and allows users to build custom OCR models from scratch.

Pros:

  • Works with multiple languages.
  • The algorithm can be calibrated to recognize information from any document type.
  • Extremely easy to use and beginner-friendly

Cons:

  • Some of the features one might need while working on a large scale are available only by using the premium version.
  • The premium version is slightly more expensive than the competitors but the accuracy and speed outweigh the additional expense.

3. Online OCR

As the name suggests it is an Online OCR that requires no installation and is totally free to use. It can recognize text and characters from PDF scanned documents, photographs, and digital camera captured images. Convert text and Images from your scanned PDF document into the editable DOC format.

Pros:

  • Has support for multiple languages including Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.
  • It can convert PDF files to Word, Excel, RTF, and plain text format.
  • It is free to use online service, which means no installation issues.

Cons:

  • Without registering you can only convert 15 files per hour.
  • When it comes to accuracy it fails to perform at 100%. There is the possibility of errors and omissions that’s why you need to proofread after conversion.

4. Simple OCR

Simple OCR is a royalty-free OCR platform that allows users to use it in custom apps. It is supported on all versions of Windows and it has a vast library of over 120,000 characters to identify words efficiently in your document.

Pros:

  • It allows image retention. That is along with the document’s text Simple OCR has the ability to capture and retain pictures from the document.
  • It offers a Despeckle option for those documents that arent particularly clear like fax or copies of copies. This feature helps reduce the image noise and increases the accuracy of Simple OCR.

Cons:

  • It’s one of the best choices if you’re a single individual, but if an organization or a business were to use it the paid version is quite expensive in comparison to its competitors.

5. Kofax OmniPage

Kofax OmniPage OCR software converts any document into the word processor format of your choice. It allows you to save, edit and search documents as you would a Word document. It offers superior conversion accuracy, intelligent character recognition, and zonal recognition, so you can quickly create editable documents.

Pros:

  • Its extremely fast and accurate conversion time increases productivity and encourages more strategic
  • It fully supports Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect, HTML, and more

Cons:

  • It provides only a free trial for a limited period of time.
  • Its programming interface can be improved.

Final words

Gone are the days when you had to painstakingly input all important documents manually into your system. The future is here, with the power of OCR software you can now increase productivity whilst not having to sacrifice accuracy.