Free Software Comparisons — Every “Best Of” List in One Place
All EngiFree comparison articles: CAD, PDF, ZIP, screen recording, photo and video editing, converters, backup, passwords, remote desktop, code editors, OCR and more.
Guides and Articles
Mathpix Snip — The Complete Guide: Equations and Tables from a Screenshot to LaTeX
Mathpix Snip turns a screenshot of an equation or table into LaTeX, Markdown or CSV. The free plan allows only 10 images and 10 PDF pages a month, in the cloud.
Frog — The Complete Guide: Copy Text from Anywhere on Your Linux Screen
Frog is a small Linux app: select a screen region and the text from an image, video, website or scanned PDF goes to the clipboard. Reads QR codes. MIT licence.
Docling — The Complete Guide: Converting PDF and DOCX to Markdown and JSON with Tables
Docling turns PDF, DOCX and scanned images into Markdown or JSON, keeping headings, reading order and table structure. MIT licence, runs locally on your PC.
Camelot — The Complete Guide: Extracting PDF Tables to Excel and CSV with Python
Camelot pulls tables out of PDF files into pandas data frames and on to CSV, Excel or JSON, with methods for ruled and unruled tables. MIT, commercial OK.
Surya — The Complete Guide: OCR, Tables and LaTeX Equations from Scanned Documents
Surya reads text in 90+ languages, analyses layout, tables with merged cells and equations as LaTeX. Models free for research, personal use and small firms.
docTR — The Complete Guide: Deep-Learning OCR for Documents and Forms
docTR detects and reads text in PDFs and images, copes with rotated pages, spots table regions and exports JSON with each word’s position. Apache 2.0, no GUI.
EasyOCR — The Complete Guide: Text Recognition in Images in a Few Lines of Python
EasyOCR returns the position, text and confidence of each text fragment in an image, in 80+ languages and a few lines of code. Apache 2.0 licence, no Hebrew.
PaddleOCR — The Complete Guide: OCR, Page Layout and Table Extraction in Python
PaddleOCR is an open-source Python package for OCR and document parsing: page layout, cell-level tables and PDF to Markdown or JSON. Apache 2.0, commercial OK.
Umi-OCR — The Complete Guide: Free Offline OCR on Your Desktop, in Batches
Umi-OCR reads text from screenshots, image folders and scanned PDFs — all locally, with no account or network. MIT licence, but Hebrew is not supported.
Pulsar — The Complete Guide: The Community Successor to Atom, a Fully Hackable Code Editor
Pulsar is the community successor to the discontinued Atom: a free open-source editor with a package manager, LSP, Git and multi-cursors, hackable via JS/CSS.
BBEdit — The Complete Guide: A Veteran Mac Editor, and What Free Mode Includes
BBEdit is a pro Mac text editor with grep across folders. After 30 days it moves to a permanent free mode with no nags; Git, LSP and projects need a licence.