# Azure Document Intelligence

5 Hacker News commenters recommended Azure Document Intelligence and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for accurate OCR, including handwriting, and for extracting complex tables, with a free tier for small volumes. One commenter warned that its pricing can be expensive and surprising.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong OCR, including handwriting (2 comments): "standard OCR sucks for handwriting; also free for up to like 50 docs a month" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579514)) "impressed me the most in terms of OCR" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114034))

## What people warn about

- Costs can be high and surprising (1 comments): "They're both very expensive and prone to surprising you." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645178))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Tesseract OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tesseract.md): 32 recommend
- [Docling](https://hackerapproved.com/p/docling.md): 19 recommend
- [Mozilla Readability](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mozilla-readability.md): 10 recommend
- [Zpdf](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zpdf.md): 8 recommend
- [MarkItDown by Microsoft](https://hackerapproved.com/p/markitdown.md): 7 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-foundry/tools/document-intelligence)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Azure Document Intelligence", https://hackerapproved.com/p/azure-document-intelligence/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).