Adobe Acrobat Pro charges $19.99/month for bundled OCR. ABBYY FineReader wants $99/year. Online OCR sites make you upload your contracts, IDs and scans to a server you don't control. Textract does the same job locally, offline, with zero telemetry, for a one-time $19.
If you've searched for a Adobe Acrobat Pro alternative, Textract is the pay-once option worth putting at the top of the list: Textract is $19, one time, and covers the same core job Adobe Acrobat Pro charges $19.99/mo for.
What makes Textract the pick for 2026
- Drag-drop OCR — Drop images (PNG/JPG/WEBP/BMP/TIFF) or PDFs, get per-page extracted text — PDFs are rasterized page-by-page automatically.
- Per-page results — Page thumbnails, text pane, per-page copy and copy-all, confidence indicator, .txt export.
- Searchable-PDF export — Rebuilds the PDF with an invisible text layer positioned from OCR word bounding boxes — Ctrl-F-able and copy-able in any PDF reader.
- Batch folder mode — Point it at a folder (recursive optional), OCR everything, get a .txt per file and a summary of files/pages/words/failures.
- Screenshot-to-text hotkey — Global Ctrl+Shift+T opens a region-capture overlay even while minimized to tray — DPI-aware across multi-monitor setups, auto-copies to clipboard.
Textract vs Adobe Acrobat Pro, at a glance
| Textract | Adobe Acrobat Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | $19.99/month ($240/yr, forever) |
| Your documents | Never leave your machine | Uploaded for cloud OCR features |
| Works fully offline | Yes | Partial |
| Searchable PDF export | Yes | Yes |
| Batch folder OCR | Yes | Limited |
| Screenshot-to-text hotkey | Yes | No |
| Telemetry | None | Extensive |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
One month of Acrobat Pro costs more than Textract, forever. Everything after month one is money you keep.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT at github.com/bensblueprints/textract-ocr-mvp, always. $19 buys the signed installer, 1-click setup and updates instead of npm i && npm start.
How accurate is the OCR?
It's Tesseract's accuracy — excellent on clean scans, screenshots and printed documents, mediocre on handwriting or heavily skewed photos. It's not a cloud vision model, and we're not claiming it is. For sensitive paperwork the trade-off is worth it: nothing gets uploaded.
Is the searchable PDF real or a gimmick?
Real. Each page is rebuilt as the original image plus an invisible text layer positioned from OCR word bounding boxes — and the test suite round-trips the output through a PDF parser to prove the text layer extracts correctly, not just eyeballs it in a reader.
The bottom line
Textract won't out-feature Adobe Acrobat Pro on every axis — no subscription tool with a bigger team and a bigger roadmap loses on everything. But for the core job, $19 once against $19.99/mo forever is a trade most people should at least look at. Textract is part of OneTimeSuite, a catalog of pay-once apps that replace subscription SaaS.
Try Textract — $19, once
Local OCR for images & PDFs — searchable-PDF export, batch folders, screenshot hotkey.