Surya OCR
Shares rank 10 of 11 OCR models by recommenders
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.
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.
5 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good accuracy out of the box
“I've had a lot of success with it out of the box with doing OCR on comics.”
Comment from 7 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: ScreenTranslate – On-device screen translator for macOS (open source)” “each got about 90% accuracy (cosine similarity) in my tests”
Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition” Ranks above rival OCR tools
“Tasserect is the worst compare to PaddleOCR , Surya/Marker”
Comment from 14 Aug 2026 in “Mistral OCR 4.1” “Surya is a lot better in that.”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Ocrbase – pdf → .md/.json document OCR and structured extraction API”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Few settings to tweak
“because you can't really tweak any knobs”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Mistral OCR 3”
Other OCR models people recommend
The four most recommended other OCR models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral OCR | 69 | 40 | 63% | 12 | — | — |
| PaddleOCR | 19 | 4 | 83% | 8 | — | Approved |
| GLM-OCR | 16 | 4 | 80% | 7 | — | Approved |
| DeepSeek-OCR | 12 | 4 | 75% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Surya OCRThis page | 5 | 0 | 100% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
All 6 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Tasserect is the worst compare to PaddleOCR , Surya/Marker”
“I've had a lot of success with it out of the box with doing OCR on comics.”
“Surya is a lot better in that.”
“because you can't really tweak any knobs”
“each got about 90% accuracy (cosine similarity) in my tests”
“trains open-weight, state-of-the-art models for document intelligence”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.