Overall Winner
Smallpdf
beats OCRmyPDF by 32 points
OCRmyPDF 34/100
Smallpdf 🏆 66/100
OCRmyPDF
Free
VS
Smallpdf
From $12/mo
The verdict
Smallpdf scores 66/100 against OCRmyPDF's 34/100. Compare the full breakdown of scores, features, pricing, and user reviews below.
Score breakdown
Dimension
OCRmyPDF
Smallpdf
Price & Value
★★★★☆ wins
★★★☆☆
Features
★★★★☆ wins
★★★☆☆
Ease of Use
★★☆☆☆
★★★★☆ wins
Reviews
★☆☆☆☆
★★★★★ wins
Each dimension rated 1–5. Higher is better across all four.
What users say
OCRmyPDF
"The self-hosted PDF OCR utility — a Tesseract wrapper beloved by paperless-ngx users"
Pros
Adds searchable text layers to PDFs with deskew/clean/rotate preprocessing Works great with installable language packs, per users Maintainer actively answers community threads — loyal selfhosted audience
Smallpdf
"A polished, well-loved PDF suite — OCR is a buried, unreviewed feature"
Pros
Polished, easy suite — 4.8 average across 5,025 user reviews Easy to use (34.6%) and fast (19.2%) per scraped reviews OCR available inside the web suite
Pricing & value
| Metric | OCRmyPDF | Smallpdf | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes | Yes | Tie |
| Starting price | Free | From $12/mo | OCRmyPDF |
Our pick