OCR technology has been applied for some time, due to its wide application, OCR language is not only limited to English.
As the sixth most commonly spoken native language around the world, there are a lot of users interested in accessing Arabic digital resource. So the needs to do OCR on files with minority language are growing, such as Arabic OCR, Japanese OCR, Russian OCR, etc.
Here in this article, you will find a list of 8 best offline and online Arabic OCR software, open source Arabic OCR, and Arabic OCR apps for Android or iPhone users.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR
Free Download macOS 10.14 or later 
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is is a technique that recognize the text within images and convert them into a textual format.
Arabic OCR Challenges
OCR is constantly get improved for languages like English it can even get 100% accuracy. But there have been major challenges in OCR accuracy for languages based on right-to-left scripts (e.g., Arabic, Persian, Urdu, etc.).
The differences in writing direction, character forms, position in the word, word structure, contextual variations, diacritics, Loops, character overlap, All these features in the Arabic language that makes it difficult for machines to detect and recognize texts.
What to consider when pick the best Arabic OCR
Then, what to consider when pick the best Arabic OCR? It should guarantee a relatively higher OCR accuracy. As for Arabic OCR, due to the language itself, the top concern is the OCR accuracy. For pretty sure, a great part of our users who want to do Arabic OCR don’t know Arabic at all, they just want to make the Arabic file in editable file, then copy and paste for translation or other intentions. Therefore, the best Arabic OCR tool should bring the most accurate results with original file formatting.
To tell you the truth, though there are numerous OCR Mac and Windows software available to recognize texts from image-based files, few of them can perform a perfect OCR job.
Being demanding and after testing dozens of OCR programs to work on Arabic files, we finally pick 8 best Arabic OCR software and online free services for our users, no matter you are a Mac user, Windows user, Android or iPhone user.
It takes several years for OCR technology to evolve, and with a deep look into the OCR accuracy, a large quantity of OCR programs has failed in the game. All those still remain popular in the market are winners. But, today we are going to pick the best Arabic OCR from best.
As a multi-platform PDF tool, Cisdem PDF Converter OCR outperforms its contenders on the diversity of input files (native PDF, scanned PDF, protected PDF, images), of output format (20 types), also on OCR accuracy and extended features to create PDFs and combine different files.
Instead of hundreds of dollars, you only need tens of dollars to get its lifetime use right. Yes, the pricing is more like a surprise for Mac and Windows users. As you may have noticed, few OCR tools are given by such an affordable price, but bring good results. However, Cisdem is.
For the OCR performance, it does outstandingly. In out test, It provides accurate text recognition, even for complex Arabic fonts and scripts. There is nothing can be that persuasive as that of real feedback from its users:
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Free Download macOS 10.14 or later Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 
Also, you can find the tutorial in the following video (starting from 02:59)
Support input: PDF, image, DjVu, DOC, DOCX, ODT, XLS, XLSX, ODS, PPT, PPTX, ODP, TXT, HTML, HTM, RTF
Support output: PDF, RTF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPTX, TXT, CSV, HTML, TIFF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, EPUB, XML, Alto XML, JSON
Batch OCR: Yes
OCR Accuracy: 98%
Abbyy has been in the field of OCR technology since 1993. It is known for providing the broadest language coverage (190+)in OCR industry. And it is also one of the most accurate Arabic OCR tools available.
Abbyy FineReader support extract text from both PDFs and images. When performing OCR on scanned images it offers advanced features like language detection, document layout refine and export options. And it also support recognize text from images with a combination of different languages.
It is an Arabic OCR software that is ideal for businesses and people who need to digitize large volumes of images.
In our test, it performs really good on Arabic OCR recognition with an accuracy rate of 98%, so only a few characters require verification after recognition. It even performs good on low quality images.
If you are, as we mentioned above, not working on Arabic OCR very often, online free Arabic OCR service deserve a try. Here we got 3 options for you, Google Docs, Convertio and i2OCR.
Support input: PDF and image
Support output: DOCX, XLSX, XLS, PPTS, PDF, TEXT, RTF, CSV, EPUB, FB2, DJVU
Batch OCR: YES
OCR Accuracy: 90%
Convertio is a free online Arabic OCR software. It is a free online site that allows you to upload Arabic documents and digitize text from it. Compared with other online OCR sites it provides a relatively high OCR accuracy, and provides a series of free service to customize the Arabic OCR. First, you can upload files from computer, Google Drive, Dropbox or even with a URL. Also, you are allowed to add other languages that applied in your file to recognize properly. Still, it offers more output options and enables partial OCR on specified pages.
Attentions:
Support input: PDF, image, RTF, DOCX, ODT, TXT
Support output: PDF, DOCX, ODT, RTF, TXT, HTML, EPUB
Batch OCR: No
OCR Accuracy: 80%
As a popular web-based and free editor, Google Docs can not only turn native PDF into editable Word, but also do OCR on scanned PDF files in different languages. Popular languages such as English, Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese are supported by Google Docs. What you need to do is log into your Google Drive, open a Arabic PDF with Google Docs, then it will automatically recognize and OCR Arabic. All the text can be easily edited and copied after conversion.
Attentions:
Support input: image
Support output: TEXT, DOC, PDF and HTML
Batch OCR: NO
OCR Accuracy: 85%+
It is easy to use, you just need to upload you file, then do a CAPTCHA test to verify you are not a robot. Once OCR finishes, you can click the “Download” icon export the image as Text, Word, PDF or HTML. Also, you can choose to translate the Arabic file with Google or Bing, even to view the file with Google Docs.
But as the formatting after OCR, it messed a little and manual adjustments will be necessary.
Attentions:
As more and more users move to work on their mobile devices, apps designed to do Arabic OCR are really saving us. Here we also pick the best Arabic OCR app for both Android and iOS users.
After going through about a dozen of Arabic OCR apps for Android, we found Text Fairy is absolutely the one does as good as commented in Google Play and mainstream download platforms.
Text Fairy, as its name tells, is an Android app to convert images and screenshots into editable text, so you can export as PDF, or copy and send to another apps. It recognizes more than 50 languages, including Arabic. For highly accurate OCR results, it allows users to crop the image, fix viewpoint and straighten the text. Everything that can be captured under your lens, can be OCR-ed by this app.
Like Android, there are apps available designed to do Arabic OCR on iPhone. Here we highly recommended IRIScan IOS. In fact, Iris OCR is quite famous in this field and has developed several OCR tools for Mac, Windows and mobile phones.
IRIScan iOS allows users to recognize Arabic text from files captured by Camera or imported from a scanner, also you are allowed to convert the Arabic files to Word, Text and searchable PDF, then share easily to Cloud.
Support input: Image
Support output: TXT, PDF, HOCR, TSV
Batch OCR: Yes
OCR Accuracy: 95%
Tesseract OCR is an industry-leading open-source OCR software developed by Google. It supports Arabic OCR and can be customized for specific needs.
It is totally free to use and get constantly updated. The latest version recognize Arabic text fairly well. It is accurate and supports various font styles and sizes.
Developers can train and improve the code to meet their specific needs. It is one of the most widely used open source OCR engine, anytime you met a problem in utilizing you can get help from it’s strong community for support and updates.
In our test, Tesseract 5 contains 5200 Arabic fonts, which covers almost all the fonts, and we just use it without any training. It has OCR Accuracy of 95% But, we found that Tesseract have problem recognizing Arabic numerals.
As you can see, no matter in which way our users will be presented with an Arabic OCR solution, it is either a desktop OCR software or an online free OCR service. For sure, they both works, but:
Users who prefer Arabic OCR software are aware of its great benefits, in terms of simplicity, safety, efficiency, accuracy, even additional features. These programs can direct the least efforts to perform a successful Arabic OCR.
Users who use online free OCR services, as you may doubt, instead of choosing for being free, they choose online free Arabic OCR for the sake of using Arabic OCR not often, requiring no installation. Though the file size limit and unstable OCR results may annoy them some times, they decide to use online free service as expedient.
So, it is all you decision to do Arabic OCR. But you do have preferences at different situations:
Nowadays, performing OCR on files, or Arabic files is not that tricky. The key is to find a tool serving for your purpose, if you want accurate results with least efforts, professional desktop OCR program is the never-fail option.
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.14 or later
Carolyn has always been passionate about reading and writing, so she joined Cisdem as an editor as soon as she graduated from university. She focuses on writing how-to articles about PDF editing and conversion.
David Coplan
I checked the video and tried the Google Docs to OCR my arabic files, it was good but need to manually adjust.
bobby
Your guide just list virtually all feasible ways to recognize texts from Arabic files, appreciate your efforts. I am using Windows PC, and your recommendation is too expensive, I prefer to try the online ones.