# The best free AI OCR and document extraction tools

Every option in the catalog for when you need to pull clean structured data out of PDFs and scans — 20 AI OCR and document extraction tools, 20 of them free or freemium, with the pricing tier printed on every row.

## Stats

- 20 tools listed
- 20 free or freemium
- 10 with no paid plan at all
- 1 sub-categories covered

## FAQ

### What are the best free AI OCR and document extraction tools?

Flocci AI Tools lists 20 of them, ordered free tiers first: dots.ocr (dots.mocr), LangExtract (Google), MinerU, olmOCR and PaddleOCR-VL. Every one of them is free or has a free tier. Each entry states what it uniquely does rather than a score.

### Which of these are completely free?

10 on this page are marked fully free with no paid plan at all: dots.ocr (dots.mocr), LangExtract (Google), MinerU, olmOCR and PaddleOCR-VL. The remaining 10 are freemium, trial or paid, and each is labelled with its exact tier so nothing surprises you at sign-up.

### How is this list ordered?

Free tools first, then freemium, then trial, then paid, and alphabetically inside each tier. Nobody pays to appear higher: Flocci AI Tools carries no ads, no sponsored slots and no paid listings, so the order reflects price and nothing else.

## Quick picks

### Which AI OCR and document extraction tools work in a browser with no install?

dots.ocr (dots.mocr), LangExtract (Google), MinerU, olmOCR and PaddleOCR-VL all work in a browser tab with no install needed — just open the site and go. 14 of the 20 free AI OCR and document extraction tools listed here are browser-based.

### Which AI OCR and document extraction tools let you sign in with Google?

AskYourPDF supports Google sign-in, so you can start without creating a new account. That's 1 of the 20 free AI OCR and document extraction tools on this page.

### Which AI OCR and document extraction tools have a mobile app?

AskYourPDF and Mathpix have an iOS or Android app. 2 of the 20 free AI OCR and document extraction tools here can run on your phone.

### Which AI OCR and document extraction tools can you self-host or run offline?

DeepSeek-OCR, Docling, Dolphin (ByteDance), Marker and MarkItDown can be self-hosted or run locally without a browser — useful for privacy, air-gapped networks, or avoiding API rate limits. 5 of the 20 free AI OCR and document extraction tools here run offline.

## Tools

- [dots.ocr (dots.mocr)](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/dots-ocr-dots-mocr) — Free — 3B vision-language model for layout parsing across many scripts
- [LangExtract (Google)](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/langextract-google) — Free — Python library extracting structured data from unstructured text with LLMs
- [MinerU](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/mineru) — Free — Parses PDFs, images and Office files into Markdown, JSON, HTML or LaTeX
- [olmOCR](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/olmocr) — Free — Apache 2.0 open-source OCR toolkit from Ai2, 19.3k GitHub stars
- [PaddleOCR-VL](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/paddleocr-vl) — Free — 1B-parameter document parsing VLM (NaViT encoder + ERNIE-4.5-0.3B)
- [DeepSeek-OCR](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/deepseek-ocr) — Free — Vision-language OCR that compresses document context optically
- [Docling](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/docling) — Free — MIT-licensed, 64.7k GitHub stars, IBM Research-originated, now under LF AI & Data Foundation
- [Dolphin (ByteDance)](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/dolphin-bytedance) — Free — Two-stage document-type and layout analysis then element parsing
- [Marker](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/marker) — Free — Apache-2.0 code, 38.7k GitHub stars, converts PDFs/DOCX/PPTX/XLSX to markdown/JSON
- [MarkItDown](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/markitdown) — Free — Converts PDF, Office files, images, audio and HTML into LLM-friendly Markdown
- [AskYourPDF](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/askyourpdf) — Freemium — Chat with any PDF plus auto-fill PDF forms
- [Chandra OCR](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/chandra-ocr) — Freemium — Converts images and PDFs to HTML, Markdown or JSON with layout
- [Humata](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/humata) — Freemium — Free tier: 60 pages, 10 answers, no card
- [LlamaParse](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/llamaparse) — Freemium — Parses 90+ formats incl. complex tables/charts/handwriting into clean markdown
- [Mathpix](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/mathpix) — Freemium — Specializes in STEM: equations, chemistry structures, handwriting to LaTeX/text
- [PDF.ai](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/pdf-ai) — Freemium — Chat-with-PDF product plus a separate parse/extract/split PDF API
- [Reducto](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/reducto) — Freemium — 15,000 free starter credits, no card required
- [Surya OCR](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/surya-ocr) — Freemium — 650M-parameter OCR VLM covering 90+ languages
- [Upstage Document AI](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/upstage-document-ai) — Freemium — Parse/Extract/Classify/Instruct pipeline billed per page
- [Mistral OCR 4](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/mistral-ocr-4) — Freemium — Self-hostable single-container OCR model for regulated industries
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Source: Flocci AI Tools — https://aitools.flocci.in/best/best-ai-ocr-document-extraction

Facts last verified: October 2026