# Surya OCR

5 Hacker News commenters recommended Surya OCR and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free open-source OCR models that people find accurate out of the box and better than rival tools; the main caveat is few settings to tweak.

## Why people recommend it

- Good accuracy out of the box (2 comments): "I've had a lot of success with it out of the box with doing OCR on comics." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47283224)) "each got about 90% accuracy (cosine similarity) in my tests" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136001))
- Ranks above rival OCR tools (2 comments): "Tasserect is the worst compare to PaddleOCR , Surya/Marker" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293634)) "Surya is a lot better in that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46720325))

## What people warn about

- Few settings to tweak (1 comments): "because you can't really tweak any knobs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333378))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Mistral OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mistral-ocr.md): 69 recommend
- [PaddleOCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paddleocr.md): 19 recommend
- [GLM-OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-ocr.md): 16 recommend
- [DeepSeek-OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-ocr.md): 12 recommend
- [dots.ocr](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dots-ocr.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Surya OCR", https://hackerapproved.com/p/surya/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).