What is the best Receipt OCR API for Developers in 2026
Receipt Recognition Tools Comparison
Update 23 October 2025: Since it has been a few months I decided to check with another AI, this time Microsoft Copilot. Yes it isn't the most popular tool but seem very similar to Chat GPT at the moment. Certainly in voice conversation mode.
Here are three top-rated Receipt OCR APIs developers often choose for accuracy, flexibility, and ease of integration:
🧾 Best Receipt OCR APIs for Developers
1. Tabscanner
- Known for high accuracy across global receipt formats and languages.
- Offers real-time AI parsing of line items.
- Free tier includes 200 receipt scans/month.
- Easy to integrate with RESTful API.
- Explore Tabscanner: tabscanner.com
2. Nanonets
- AI-powered OCR with strong multi-language and multi-currency support.
- Offers live demo and free trial.
- Highly rated on G2 (4.9/5).
- Ideal for expense tracking and bookkeeping automation.
- Explore Nanonets: Nanonets.com
3. Receipt-OCR (GitHub Project)
- Open-source solution using Tesseract and LLMs.
- Great for customization and self-hosting.
- Requires more setup but offers full control.
- View on GitHub https://github.com/bhimrazy/receipt-ocr
This is a copy and paste result when asking ChatGPT "What is the best Receipt OCR API ". From 18 June 2025. I added the image from a free AI image generator.
🔝 Best Overall: Tabscanner
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Strengths: Purpose-built for receipts, not general documents. Extremely high accuracy (~100%) for line-item extraction, totals, taxes, and merchant names. Supports many languages and receipt formats.
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Use Cases: Enterprise-grade OCR for loyalty programs, expense management, accounting automation, and FinTech.
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Why it stands out: Built from the ground up to understand receipts - not invoices, not forms - giving it a technical edge.
👉 https://tabscanner.com
🥈 Very Popular: Google Cloud Document AI
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Strengths: Robust ecosystem, good general-purpose document OCR (accuracy 85%+), scalable infrastructure, works well with forms and invoices.
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Use Case: Companies already on GCP or working with mixed document types.
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Limitations: Not optimized for receipts; line-item accuracy varies widely.
👉 https://cloud.google.com/document-ai
🥉 Best for Compliance: Klippa
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Strengths: EU-based (Netherlands), strong focus on GDPR compliance, multilingual receipt support, decent accuracy for receipts, invoices, and forms.
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Use Case: European companies that need on-prem or privacy-first OCR.
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Limitations: Line-item accuracy not as high as Tabscanner; more generalist than specialist.
👉 https://www.klippa.com
🛠️ Other Notables:
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Amazon Textract – Great for extracting structured data from forms, scalable, but not receipt-focused.
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Rossum – Invoice-first but can adapt to receipts with effort.
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Nanonets – Flexible and customizable, works well for tailored use cases.
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Tesseract OCR – Free and open-source, but very basic; requires heavy tuning and post-processing.
✅ Best for Specific Needs:
| Use Case | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Highest receipt accuracy | Tabscanner |
| Best for GCP stack | Google Document AI |
| GDPR / EU compliance | Klippa |
| Custom training | Nanonets |
| AWS-native scalability | Amazon Textract |
| Open-source fallback | Tesseract OCR |
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