Best Copyfish Alternative

Last updated: February 26, 2026

Copyfish is one of the most popular OCR browser extensions with 800,000+ users, but it sends your images to external servers for processing — a significant privacy concern for screenshots of confidential documents, contracts, or personal information. PickText OCR processes everything locally using Tesseract.js WASM, so your images never leave your device.

Feature	Copyfish	OneClickPDF
Local processing	No (server upload)	Yes (Tesseract.js WASM)
Free & unlimited	Limited free tier	✓
Languages	Limited (free)	16 languages
Region selection	✓	✓
Right-click image	✓	✓
Screenshot OCR	✓	✓
Table detection	✗	Yes (CSV export)
Confidence scoring	✗	Yes (word-level)
Preprocessing	✗	Grayscale, contrast, binarize
History	✗	Yes (local storage)
PDF OCR	✗	Yes (via web app)
Offline capable	✗	Yes (English bundled)

Why Users Switch From Copyfish

✗Images are uploaded to external OCR servers for processing — your screenshots and images leave your device
✗Free tier has daily usage limits and lower accuracy
✗Premium plan required for better accuracy and more languages
✗No table detection or structured data extraction
✗No confidence scoring — you can't tell which words might be inaccurate
✗No preprocessing options to improve OCR accuracy on poor-quality images

OneClickPDF Advantages

✓100% local processing — images never leave your browser, all OCR runs via Tesseract.js WASM on your device
✓16 languages supported with on-demand language pack downloads
✓Table detection with CSV export — automatically identifies tabular data
✓Word-level confidence scoring with visual highlighting (green/yellow/red)
✓Image preprocessing: grayscale, contrast boost, and Otsu binarization to improve accuracy
✓Multiple capture modes: upload image, screenshot page, select region, or right-click any image
✓Full web app with PDF OCR at oneclickpdf.net/tools/ocr for scanned PDFs

Copyfish has been a go-to OCR extension for years, and for good reason — the concept of right-clicking an image or selecting a region to extract text is genuinely useful. But the fundamental architecture is a privacy problem: every image you capture is sent to an external OCR server for processing.

Consider what you might be OCRing: screenshots of confidential emails, images of contracts, photos of medical documents, or financial statements. Every one of these gets uploaded to Copyfish's servers when you use the extension. Even if they promise to delete the data afterward, the transmission itself is the vulnerability.

PickText OCR takes a different approach. It bundles Tesseract.js — a WebAssembly port of the industry-standard Tesseract OCR engine — directly in the extension. All OCR processing happens on your device. No servers, no uploads, no data exposure. The English language model is bundled with the extension, and additional languages download on-demand from a CDN and are cached locally.

Beyond privacy, PickText OCR offers features Copyfish doesn't: word-level confidence scoring shows you exactly which words might be inaccurate, table detection automatically identifies tabular data and lets you export it as CSV, and preprocessing options (grayscale, contrast, binarization) let you improve accuracy on difficult images. For full PDF OCR (processing entire scanned documents), the companion web app at oneclickpdf.net handles multi-page PDF files with the same local processing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Copyfish upload my images to servers?

Yes. Copyfish sends captured images to external OCR servers for processing. This means screenshots of confidential documents, personal information, or private correspondence are transmitted over the internet. PickText OCR processes everything locally using Tesseract.js WASM — your images never leave your device.

Is PickText OCR as accurate as Copyfish?

Both use established OCR engines. OneClickPDF uses Tesseract.js (the same engine Google developed for Google Books scanning), which provides strong accuracy for printed text. The preprocessing options (contrast, grayscale, binarization) can further improve accuracy on challenging images.

Can I OCR text in languages other than English?

Yes. PickText OCR supports 16 languages including Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, and more. English is bundled with the extension; other languages download automatically on first use.

Does PickText OCR work offline?

Yes, for English. The English language model and Tesseract.js WASM engine are bundled with the extension. Other languages require an initial download but are cached locally for subsequent use.

Can I OCR tables and export to spreadsheets?

Yes. PickText OCR automatically detects tables in images and offers CSV export. This is particularly useful for extracting data from screenshots of financial reports, invoices, or data tables.

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