What is Amazon Textract used for?

Amazon Textract is used to extract text, handwriting, forms, and tables from scanned documents so data can be processed automatically.

Who should use Amazon Textract?

Amazon Textract suits developers and data teams building document processing workflows on AWS, especially in finance, insurance, healthcare, and government.

How is Amazon Textract priced?

Amazon Textract uses pay-as-you-go pricing per page processed, with rates that vary by API, and new AWS customers get a free tier.

Can Amazon Textract read handwriting?

Yes. Amazon Textract detects both printed text and handwriting, and it extracts form fields and tables while keeping their structure.

What are the best alternatives to Amazon Textract?

Top alternatives to Amazon Textract include Google Document AI, Azure AI Document Intelligence, ABBYY FlexiCapture, and Nanonets for document data extraction.

Amazon Textract Reviews, Features & Alternatives

Overview

What is Amazon Textract?

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service from AWS that automatically extracts printed text, handwriting, and structured data from scanned documents. Beyond basic OCR, it identifies form key-value pairs, tables, and signatures, and offers specialized APIs for invoices, receipts, identity documents, and lending files. Developers call it through APIs and SDKs with pay-as-you-go pricing. Engineering, operations, and data teams in finance, insurance, healthcare, and the public sector use it to automate document processing.

Best for

Software DevelopersData EngineersFinance OperationsInsurance TeamsHealthcare Administrators

Product snapshot

Category: Data Extraction & Collection
Best for: Developer document extraction
Deployment: Cloud
Free trial: Yes
Integrations: Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon A2I
AI features: Yes

Key features

Key features of Amazon Textract

Text detection

Extract printed text and handwriting from images and PDF files.

Forms extraction

Identify key-value pairs in forms while keeping their relationships intact.

Table extraction

Capture table structure and cell contents for downstream processing.

Natural language queries

Ask natural language questions to pull specific values from documents.

Expense analysis

Extract vendor, totals, and line items from invoices and receipts.

Identity documents

Read fields from passports and driver licenses through a dedicated API.

Reviews

Amazon Textract reviews

Overall

Nobody has reviewed

What users like

Extracts forms and tables
Flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model
Handles handwriting and printed text
Works with other AWS services

What users dislike

Requires developer skills to use
Costs grow with page volume
Best suited to AWS users
Learning curve for AWS setup

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Alternatives

Top Amazon Textract alternatives

Google Document AI
Best for
Google Cloud users
Why choose it
Pretrained processors for many document types
Azure AI Document Intelligence
Best for
Microsoft Azure users
Why choose it
Prebuilt and custom extraction models
ABBYY FlexiCapture
Best for
Enterprise document capture
Why choose it
Mature capture with on-premise options
Nanonets
Best for
No-code document extraction
Why choose it
Easy model training without coding
View Nanonets

Integrations

Amazon Textract integrations

Amazon Textract is part of the AWS ecosystem and is called through the AWS SDKs, CLI, and REST APIs. Documents are usually stored in Amazon S3, and AWS Lambda functions or AWS Step Functions trigger extraction jobs as files arrive. Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) adds human review for low-confidence results, while Amazon Comprehend can analyze the extracted text for entities and sentiment. Results can be loaded into Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon OpenSearch Service, or data warehouses for search and analytics. Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker can use Textract output in generative AI and machine learning pipelines, and many partner document processing tools build on Textract.

FAQ

Amazon Textract