Tesseract vs EasyOCR vs PaddleOCR: Real-World OCR Performance Benchmark

Tesseract is Still the Default Choice, But That’s a Mistake

I spent three weeks processing 10,000 product label images for an inventory automation project, and I started with Tesseract because — well, everyone does. It’s the OCR engine that shows up first in every tutorial, every Stack Overflow answer, every “getting started with text recognition” guide.

But after watching it choke on rotated text, struggle with non-Latin scripts, and produce garbled output on anything slightly degraded, I decided to actually benchmark it against EasyOCR and PaddleOCR. The results changed how I think about OCR pipeline design entirely.

The Test Setup (and Why Most Benchmarks Are Useless)

Most OCR comparisons test on clean, high-contrast scanned documents. That’s not what real computer vision looks like. My dataset included:

• 3,200 product labels (varying lighting, perspective distortion, occasional blur)
• 2,800 receipt images (thermal printer fade, crumpled paper, shadows)
• 2,400 street signs (different fonts, weather damage, oblique angles)
• 1,600 handwritten notes (because why not make it harder)

All images were 1920×1080 JPEGs. I ran tests on an RTX 3080 (10GB VRAM) with CUDA 11.8, Python 3.10.12, and measured three things: accuracy (character error rate), speed (images per second), and memory footprint.

import time
import pytesseract
import easyocr
from paddleocr import PaddleOCR
import cv2
import numpy as np
from Levenshtein import distance as levenshtein

# Ground truth labels from manual annotation
with open('ground_truth.json') as f:
    ground_truth = json.load(f)

def calculate_cer(predicted, actual):
    """Character Error Rate - standard OCR metric"""
    return levenshtein(predicted, actual) / len(actual)

# Tesseract setup (v5.3.0)
tesseract_config = '--oem 3 --psm 6'  # LSTM engine, assume uniform block

# EasyOCR setup (v1.7.0)
easy_reader = easyocr.Reader(['en'], gpu=True)

# PaddleOCR setup (v2.7.0.3)
paddle_ocr = PaddleOCR(use_angle_cls=True, lang='en', 
                       use_gpu=True, show_log=False)

One preprocessing mistake cost me a full day: I initially converted everything to grayscale thinking it would help. It didn’t. EasyOCR and PaddleOCR both performed worse on grayscale because their detection models were trained on RGB. Tesseract didn’t care much either way, but the color-to-gray conversion added 40ms per image for zero benefit.

Tesseract: Fast, Brittle, and Shockingly Bad at Angles

Tesseract 5 (with LSTM mode) processed images at 8.2 fps on CPU, which sounds great until you realize the output quality. Average CER across my dataset: 0.18 (18% character error rate). That’s… rough.

Where it failed hardest:

• Rotated text: Anything more than 5 degrees off-axis and accuracy plummeted. The --psm 0 mode (automatic page segmentation with orientation detection) helped slightly but added 200ms per image.
• Multi-language: I threw in 500 images with mixed English/Korean text. Tesseract with lang='eng+kor' hit 0.31 CER. Useless.
• Low contrast: Faded receipts were a disaster. Even with adaptive thresholding preprocessing, it missed entire lines.

But here’s the thing — when the text was clean, horizontal, and high-contrast, Tesseract was perfect. CER dropped to 0.02 on the 800 scanned document images I tested separately. If you’re processing standardized forms or book scans, Tesseract is still the right choice. It’s lightweight (40MB disk, 300MB RAM), runs on a potato, and has decades of production battle-testing.

def run_tesseract_batch(image_paths):
    results = []
    start = time.time()

    for img_path in image_paths:
        img = cv2.imread(img_path)
        # This preprocessing helped marginally for receipts
        gray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
        # Adaptive threshold instead of global - learned this the hard way
        thresh = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(
            gray, 255, cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_GAUSSIAN_C, 
            cv2.THRESH_BINARY, 11, 2
        )
        text = pytesseract.image_to_string(thresh, config=tesseract_config)
        results.append(text)

    elapsed = time.time() - start
    print(f"Tesseract: {len(image_paths)/elapsed:.2f} fps")
    return results

Memory usage stayed flat at ~300MB regardless of batch size. No GPU support in the version I tested, though apparently TensorFlow-based forks exist. I haven’t tried them.

EasyOCR: The “Just Works” Option That Actually Does

EasyOCR shocked me. I expected it to be the slow, accurate option. It was accurate (0.09 CER average), but also faster than I anticipated at 3.1 fps on GPU.

What made the difference:

• Built-in text detection: It doesn’t assume your text is in neat horizontal lines. The CRAFT detector (from Baek et al., 2019, if I recall correctly) found text regions at any angle, then the recognition model read them. This alone made rotated street signs readable.
• Multi-language is actually usable: Same 500 English/Korean mixed images? 0.11 CER. Not perfect, but I could actually use the output.
• Confidence scores: Every detection came with a confidence value. I filtered out anything below 0.5 and accuracy jumped to 0.07 CER with minimal false positives.

The downside? VRAM. Loading the model took 2.8GB just for English. Adding Korean pushed it to 3.4GB. And unlike Tesseract, you can’t just process one image and exit — the startup cost (4 seconds to load models) means you want to batch.

def run_easyocr_batch(image_paths, batch_size=32):
    results = []
    start = time.time()

    for i in range(0, len(image_paths), batch_size):
        batch_paths = image_paths[i:i+batch_size]
        batch_results = []

        for img_path in batch_paths:
            img = cv2.imread(img_path)
            detections = easy_reader.readtext(img)
            # detections is list of (bbox, text, confidence)
            # This filtering saved me from a lot of noise
            text = ' '.join([t for (bbox, t, conf) in detections if conf > 0.5])
            batch_results.append(text)

        results.extend(batch_results)

    elapsed = time.time() - start
    print(f"EasyOCR: {len(image_paths)/elapsed:.2f} fps")
    return results

One weird quirk: EasyOCR sometimes merged separate text regions into nonsense phrases. A product label with “ORGANIC” on top and “FLOUR” below would occasionally come back as “ORGANICFLOUR” with no space. I’m not entirely sure why the detector didn’t separate them properly, but adding a manual line-break heuristic based on bbox y-coordinates fixed most cases.

PaddleOCR: Absurdly Fast and Surprisingly Good

PaddleOCR was the dark horse. I’d barely heard of it outside Chinese CV circles, but it destroyed the competition on speed: 12.7 fps on GPU. And accuracy? 0.10 CER. Slightly worse than EasyOCR, noticeably better than Tesseract.

How is it this fast? The PP-OCRv3 architecture uses a lightweight detection model (3MB) and a recognition model (12MB) that run in parallel pipelines. On CUDA, the whole thing barely touched 1.2GB VRAM.

def run_paddleocr_batch(image_paths):
    results = []
    start = time.time()

    for img_path in image_paths:
        img = cv2.imread(img_path)
        # PaddleOCR returns [[[bbox], (text, confidence)], ...]
        ocr_result = paddle_ocr.ocr(img, cls=True)  # cls=True enables angle correction

        if ocr_result[0] is None:  # This happened on ~2% of images, mostly blank
            results.append('')
            continue

        # Extract text in reading order (top to bottom, left to right)
        boxes = [line[0] for line in ocr_result[0]]
        texts = [line[1][0] for line in ocr_result[0]]

        # Sort by y-coordinate to fix occasional out-of-order detections
        sorted_texts = [t for _, t in sorted(zip([b[0][1] for b in boxes], texts))]
        results.append(' '.join(sorted_texts))

    elapsed = time.time() - start
    print(f"PaddleOCR: {len(image_paths)/elapsed:.2f} fps")
    return results

The use_angle_cls=True parameter was critical. Without it, rotated text accuracy dropped to Tesseract levels. With it enabled, the angle classifier added only 8ms per image but fixed nearly all orientation issues.

Where PaddleOCR stumbled: handwritten text. It’s clearly optimized for printed characters. On my 1,600 handwritten notes, CER spiked to 0.24 compared to EasyOCR’s 0.16. If your pipeline includes handwriting, this matters.

The Real Comparison: What Actually Matters in Production

Forget the averages for a second. Here’s what I learned running this in a real pipeline:

Tesseract wins if:
– You’re on CPU-only infrastructure
– Your images are clean scans or standardized forms
– You need instant cold-start (no model loading time)
– Disk/RAM is constrained (embedded systems, Lambda functions)

EasyOCR wins if:
– Accuracy is non-negotiable
– You have mixed languages or scripts
– Text orientation varies wildly
– You can afford 3-4GB VRAM and 4-second startup

PaddleOCR wins if:
– You need GPU speed at scale
– Accuracy can be “pretty good” instead of “best possible”
– You’re processing thousands of images in batches
– Your text is printed (not handwritten)

I ended up using PaddleOCR for the bulk processing (10x faster than EasyOCR made batching trivial) and falling back to EasyOCR for the ~8% of images where PaddleOCR’s confidence scores were below 0.7. This hybrid approach got me 0.08 CER at 9.4 fps average.

Preprocessing Actually Matters (But Not How You Think)

I wasted time on elaborate preprocessing pipelines — Gaussian blur, CLAHE histogram equalization, morphological operations — that barely moved the needle. What did help:

1. Resize to consistent width (1280px): All three engines performed better with normalized input size. Probably a training artifact.
2. Padding: Adding 20px white border around images reduced edge detection failures by ~15%. No idea why this isn’t default.
3. Skew correction: For Tesseract only. EasyOCR and PaddleOCR handle it internally.

What didn’t help:
– Denoising filters (slower, no accuracy gain)
– Contrast stretching (made things worse on already-bright images)
– Binarization (let the models handle it)

And here’s a fun failure: I tried running all three engines and taking a majority vote for each character. Accuracy went down because Tesseract’s failures were consistent enough to outvote the correct answers. Turns out ensemble methods need diverse error modes, and these engines fail in similar ways on similar inputs.

What I’d Do Differently Next Time

If I were starting this project today, I’d skip Tesseract entirely unless I had a specific CPU-only requirement. The gap between rule-based OCR and deep learning detectors is too wide now.

I’d also spend more time on custom post-processing. All three engines occasionally output obviously wrong text — a product label reading “0RG4NIC” instead of “ORGANIC”, phone numbers with letters, etc. A simple spell-checker pass (I used pyspellchecker) caught 30% of these errors with near-zero false positives.

The one thing I’m still curious about: none of these engines handle document layout well. If you have a complex page with tables, multi-column text, and images, the reading order gets scrambled. I’ve heard LayoutLM and similar transformer-based document understanding models solve this, but I haven’t tested them at scale. Maybe that’s the next benchmark.

For now? If you’re building an OCR pipeline in 2026, start with PaddleOCR. It’s fast enough for real-time, accurate enough for production, and light enough to run anywhere. Save EasyOCR for the hard cases.