Granite vs Umi-OCR

Granite and Umi-OCR are both document q&a / pdf chat tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

Granite

Granite ingests your personal documents — receipts, insurance policies, vehicle titles, EOBs, tax forms — and makes them searchable by meaning, not filename. Drop a file in, and the system extracts the content, indexes it, and lets you ask questions in plain language rather than hunting through folder trees. The free tier caps at 25 documents and 1 GB, which covers a light user testing the concept. Once your document count climbs — multiple tax years, several insurance policies, a rental property's worth of records — you hit that ceiling fast, and the paid annual subscription is the only path forward. There is no self-hosted option and no API, so every document you store lives on Granite's infrastructure.

Umi-OCR

The tool handles screenshot capture, bulk image import, PDF extraction, and QR scanning through a GUI, a CLI, or an HTTP interface — all offline. Bundled OCR engines cover Chinese, Japanese, and other languages without additional downloads. Batch jobs on scanned archives run without throttling because there is no rate limit to hit. The ceiling appears when your documents need handwriting recognition or layout analysis that goes beyond what the bundled engines support — at that point you are looking at a custom engine swap, which the build docs describe but requires developer effort. Teams needing cloud-scale parallel processing across distributed workers will find the single-machine model too constrained.

Attribute	Granite	Umi-OCR
Pricing	Paid	Free
Price	$99/year	—
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	No	Yes
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	Web (cloud)	Windows 7 x64, Linux x64
Pros	Semantic search over document content rather than filenames, so you find the deductible buried inside a 40-page insurance PDF without opening the file. Automatic document type recognition for tax forms, EOBs, and insurance policies, which means you skip the manual tagging that makes every other personal archive system collapse within six months. Plain-language querying across your full archive, so asking 'did I pay estimated taxes in Q3 last year' returns an answer instead of a folder to dig through. Free tier lets you validate the extraction quality on your actual document types before committing to annual billing — so you are not discovering the OCR fails on your scanned lease after paying.	Fully offline operation with no account or API key required, so documents containing regulated or confidential content never leave the host machine — eliminating the compliance review that cloud OCR services trigger. Bundled multilingual engine with Chinese and Japanese support included out of the box, so teams digitizing East Asian documents avoid the separate language-pack installation step that breaks most open-source OCR setups. Ignore-zone masking for watermarks, headers, and footers, which means the recognized text output is clean without a post-processing filter to strip repeated boilerplate. CLI and HTTP interfaces alongside the GUI, so the same tool works in an analyst's desktop session and in an unattended batch script without maintaining two separate OCR integrations. MIT license with self-hosted deployment, so teams can embed it in commercial internal tooling or modify the source without licensing negotiation.
Cons	The 25-document free tier is exhausted the moment you upload two tax years plus a handful of insurance policies — teams evaluating at scale cannot test realistic document volumes without immediately hitting a paywall. No API and no self-hosted option means every document — W-2s, Social Security statements, medical EOBs — lives on Granite's cloud infrastructure; any team with a client whose compliance requirements prohibit third-party financial document storage switches to a self-hosted document intelligence solution like Paperless-ngx or a private deployment before the first document goes in. Expiration tracking is passive: you have to remember to ask. There is no proactive alerting when a vehicle registration or lease approaches its end date, so users who wanted an automated reminder system are maintaining a separate calendar or task tool alongside Granite. No multi-user or household sharing tier described on the vendor page, which means couples or business partners managing shared property or insurance records are duplicating uploads across separate accounts.	Handwriting recognition is not a documented capability of the bundled engine — teams processing handwritten forms or mixed print-and-handwriting documents hit a hard wall and must either swap in a different engine through the build process or abandon the tool for a service with handwriting model support. The architecture is single-host: the HTTP interface accepts external calls, but there is no built-in job queue or worker distribution, so batch workloads that exceed one machine's throughput require the team to build their own load distribution layer on top — at which point maintaining that wrapper becomes its own project. Windows and Linux x64 are the only supported platforms per the repository; teams on macOS or ARM builds must compile from source themselves, and the docs place that responsibility on the developer, not the release process.

Bottom line

Granite is paid while Umi-OCR is free; Umi-OCR is open source; only Umi-OCR exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Granite and Umi-OCR?

Granite is Paid, while Umi-OCR is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is Granite better than Umi-OCR?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.