PaddleOCR

PaddleOCR is a powerful, lightweight OCR toolkit with 91,000+ stars on GitHub that turns PDFs and images into structured data for AI, with support for more than 100 languages.

Overview

From Baidu’s PaddlePaddle ecosystem, PaddleOCR has grown from a text-recognition library into a complete document-intelligence stack. Its PP-OCR models handle text detection and recognition across more than 100 languages, while PP-Structure adds layout analysis, table recognition and key-information extraction, converting documents into clean structured output. The newest PaddleOCR-VL models bridge OCR and large language models directly, parsing whole documents into LLM-ready data for RAG pipelines. Everything is engineered to be practical: models are lightweight enough for edge and CPU deployment, yet accurate enough for production document processing at scale. The project is Apache-2.0 licensed and actively developed, with repository updates in September 2026, and it remains one of the most deployed OCR toolkits in the world.

Key Features

• 100+ languages – multilingual text detection and recognition, including Chinese and English documents.
• Document structure parsing – layout analysis, tables and forms converted to structured data.
• PaddleOCR-VL – vision-language models that turn documents into LLM-ready content.
• PDF to Markdown – a direct pipeline for feeding documents into RAG systems.
• Lightweight models – small, fast PP-OCR models deployable on servers, edge devices and mobile.
• Production tooling – training, fine-tuning and serving support for custom OCR scenarios.

💳 Pricing

PaddleOCR is completely free and open source under the Apache License 2.0. There are no usage fees for the toolkit or its pretrained models.

Who Is It For

Developers building document processing, invoice and form extraction, multilingual OCR, or document pipelines that feed LLMs and RAG systems.