Free OCR Online

About Free OCR Online

Free OCR Online extracts text from scanned PDFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and TIFFs using Tesseract.js running locally in your browser — no upload, no server, no account. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts image-based documents into selectable, searchable, copyable text. Our tool supports 100+ languages, handles skewed and low-contrast scans with automatic deskewing, and outputs plain text, structured JSON, or a searchable PDF with an invisible text layer over the original image. Once text is extracted, you can convert the PDF to Word for full editing, or run it through our AI PDF summarizer to get a quick digest of the content.

Most free OCR services (OnlineOCR, i2OCR, Adobe Scan) upload your document to a server for processing, which is a real privacy concern for medical records, legal filings, and financial statements. Ours runs Tesseract.js entirely in the browser via WebAssembly — the image is analyzed locally and the text is extracted without any network request. This makes it genuinely private. For users who need higher accuracy on difficult scans, we also offer a cloud-assisted mode that uses a more capable OCR engine with the same auto-delete privacy policy. If the scanned document is large, compressing it first can speed up OCR processing significantly.

Language-specific OCR: Hindi · Arabic · Chinese · Japanese · Korean · Thai · Russian · Urdu · Bengali · Tamil · Hebrew

How We Compare

Compared to desktop alternatives like Adobe Acrobat Pro (starting at $19.99/month), Smallpdf ($12/month for unlimited), or iLovePDF ($9/month Premium), PDF AI Tools delivers comparable quality at $0 for the core feature set. We skip the subscription friction by processing most operations directly in your browser with WebAssembly — no server infrastructure costs to pass on to users. Our AI features (summarization, chat, OCR) use a pay-as-you-go backend that keeps your total cost well under $5/month even for power users.

How to Use Free OCR Online

1. Step 1: Upload a scanned PDF or image — JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, or WebP
2. Step 2: Select the document language (defaults to English auto-detect)
3. Step 3: Choose output format: plain text to copy, searchable PDF to download, or JSON for developers
4. Step 4: Click Run OCR — Tesseract processes pages sequentially in your browser
5. Step 5: Copy the extracted text or download the searchable PDF with your text layer embedded

Why Choose PDF AI Tools

We've built PDF AI Tools to replace expensive desktop software like Adobe Acrobat for 95% of common document workflows — at zero cost to you. Unlike competitors who gate features behind paywalls, add watermarks, or limit file sizes, our tools are genuinely free and genuinely unlimited. Your privacy matters: files processed client-side in your browser never touch our servers, and even AI-powered features use encrypted, auto-deleting processing pipelines.

Key Features

• 100% client-side OCR via Tesseract.js WebAssembly — no upload for standard documents
• 100+ language support — English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and more
• Automatic deskewing — corrects rotated and tilted scans before OCR
• Output formats: plain text, searchable PDF (invisible text layer), or JSON with confidence scores
• Handles scanned PDFs, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, and BMP inputs
• No signup, no file size limit (browser RAM permitting), no daily cap

Frequently Asked Questions