EasyOCR

EasyOCR is a ready-to-use optical character recognition library that extracts text from images in more than 80 languages. Built on PyTorch, it pairs a proven text detection model with a recognition network, and it lives up to its name: reading text from a photo takes just a couple of lines of Python.

Overview

EasyOCR has earned more than 30,000 stars on GitHub and remains a default choice for developers who need OCR without enterprise contracts or cloud dependencies. It supports all popular writing scripts, including Latin, Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari and Cyrillic, and handles real-world inputs like street signs, documents, screenshots and scanned forms. The pipeline uses the CRAFT algorithm for detecting text regions and a CRNN model for recognition, with GPU acceleration when available and CPU support when it is not. Because it runs entirely locally, it fits privacy-sensitive and offline workflows where sending images to a cloud OCR API is not an option.

Key Features

• Text extraction in 80+ languages and all major writing scripts
• Two-line Python API, with a command-line interface for quick jobs
• CRAFT detection plus CRNN recognition models, running on PyTorch
• GPU acceleration with CPU fallback for laptops and edge devices
• Fully local processing: no cloud API keys, quotas or per-page fees
• Bounding boxes, confidence scores and paragraph grouping in the output
• Free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license, by Jaided AI

💳 Pricing

EasyOCR is completely free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license. There are no usage limits or paid tiers for the library itself.

Who Is It For

EasyOCR is for developers and data teams building document processing, receipt and invoice extraction, archive digitization, license plate reading, and any application that needs dependable text recognition in many languages without cloud lock-in.