Textract and Adobe Acrobat Pro solve the same problem from opposite directions: one is source-available software you can own outright for $19, the other is a subscription at $19.99/mo run entirely on someone else's servers.
Head to head
| 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 |
What Textract does well
- 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.
What Adobe Acrobat Pro still does better
There's a real reason Adobe Acrobat Pro costs what it does: a bigger team, broader integrations and dedicated support behind it. If that ecosystem is genuinely what you need, it's worth paying for.
Which one should you pick
If your workflow depends on Adobe Acrobat Pro's specific integrations or you'd rather not run anything yourself, stay put — that's a legitimate call. If you're comfortable owning the tool and want to stop paying $19.99/mo for a job your own hardware can do, Textract pays for itself and then some: one month of Acrobat Pro costs more than Textract, forever. Everything after month one is money you keep.
Try Textract — $19, once
Local OCR for images & PDFs — searchable-PDF export, batch folders, screenshot hotkey.