What is the Best OCR Software for Windows 11 PC 2026?

Paperless-ngx is a free, open-source document management system that can serve as an OCR software for Windows 11, especially if you're looking to organize, digitize, and search through large volumes of scanned documents. While its primary focus is on document organization and retrieval, it includes robust OCR capabilities that automatically extract text from scanned images and PDFs.

Using Paperless-ngx, you can set up an automated workflow where you drop in batches of scanned documents—whether they are clean PDFs or older, faded physical scans—and it will process them to extract text, detect metadata, and categorize files for easy access later. It supports multiple OCR engines, including Tesseract, giving you flexibility in balancing accuracy and processing speed.

One of the advantages of Paperless-ngx as an OCR software for Windows 11 is its ability to handle large-scale batch processing, making it suitable for projects involving thousands of documents. It also preserves layout information and can handle multi-column texts, which is essential for maintaining the integrity of complex documents.

One of the advantages of Paperless-ngx as an OCR software for Windows 11 is its ability to handle large-scale batch processing, making it suitable for projects involving thousands of documents. It also preserves layout information and can handle multi-column texts, which is essential for maintaining the integrity of complex documents.