Tesseract OCR in 2026

TL;DR

• Tesseract is free, open-source, and the right choice if you need plain text extraction, control your own infrastructure, and have engineers to integrate it.
• It does not natively extract tables, return structured layouts, or output markdown. Building a production OCR product on Tesseract means building all of that yourself.
• LensCopy is the managed alternative for users who want clean markdown output without running infrastructure. Free tier is 10 pages lifetime; Basic is $14.99/month for 2,500 pages.