Surya
What ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini & Grok actually say · July 2026
The verdict
Surya appears in 1 AI-ranked category.
The best open-source option in practice — modern deep-learning OCR with layout detection, reading order, and 90+ languages, and Marker turns scanned PDFs into clean markdown; self-hostable for privacy-sensitive documents (medical, legal) with accuracy that beats Tesseract decisively and approaches cloud APIs on clean scans.
Where Surya falls short, per the models
- Claude You run the infrastructure — GPU needed for reasonable throughput, and the GPL/commercial licensing split plus lower accuracy on badly degraded scans make it a poor fit for teams wanting a zero-ops API.
Top alternatives per the models: Azure AI Document Intelligence · Google Cloud Document AI · Amazon Textract · Mistral OCR
Watch Surya
Boards re-poll weekly and the models change their minds. One short email only when Surya's standing moves — a rank change, a rival overtaking, or new reasoning from the models. Nothing otherwise.
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Surya ranks #7 for best ocr api for extracting text from scanned pdfs by AI-model consensus. Put the badge in your README, docs or site — it updates automatically as the models re-rank.
[](https://modelsagree.com/best/best-ocr-api-for-extracting-text-from-scanned-pdfs?utm_source=badge&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=badge-surya)<a href="https://modelsagree.com/best/best-ocr-api-for-extracting-text-from-scanned-pdfs?utm_source=badge&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=badge-surya"><img src="https://modelsagree.com/badge/surya.svg" alt="Surya — ranked #7 for Best OCR API for extracting text from scanned PDFs by AI models on ModelsAgree" height="28"></a>Rankings are computed from what the models answer, re-polled weekly · raw reasoning shown verbatim · methodology