Is Tesseract still the best choice for local OCR in 2026? I was always underwhelmed with its real-world performance.
I, at this point, use Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct for most of the small OCR I want to do. It is much much better than my experience with Tesseract in general. The nice thing about it is that if you give it, say, a movie poster you can ask for the "title of the movie" and it will, to the best of its ability, do just that, no need for regex or filtering after. For smallish images after loading the 3B model runs in I might b…
Leo, i benchmarked Qwen2.5-VL-3B, 4-bit via MLX, against Tesseract on the same 24 samples: https://thiagotigaz.github.io/ocr-it/bench/
Its much lower and the error rate is much higher. It works, but for our usecase, "clean rendered text" (extract from kindle for example) tesseract is much better.