The Textract alternative for teams about to build a capture platform by accident.
Textract is frequently the real competitor in a build-versus-buy conversation: a team proposes Textract plus glue code instead of a capture platform. It is excellent at what it does. What it does not do is workflow, templates, validation, human review, tenancy, audit or export — which is the part that becomes an unowned internal product by year two.
The honest read
- Recognition quality with zero operations and elastic scale
- Pre-trained expense, ID and lending APIs
- A bill that starts at nothing
- Being the platform: intake, workflow, templates, validation, review, tenancy, audit, export
- Operator hubs that already exist, including a review UI you do not have to build
- $0 per page after the hardware, with local models if you want them
- One system to run instead of a Lambda estate nobody owns
The second year — when the glue code has become an internal product with no owner and the page bill has grown linear with volume.
KognitCapture vs Amazon Textract, side by side
| Capability | KognitCapture | Amazon Textract |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A capture platform | Five recognition APIs |
| Human review | Verification hub with zones, hOCR fill, validations, share links | Augmented A2I review loops you assemble |
| Workflow | Flow engine with routing, SLA and retention | Yours to build |
| Tenancy and audit | Native, per tenant | Yours to build |
| Cost | Flat licence plus your infrastructure | $1.50 per 1k pages text, $15 per 1k forms/tables |
What each one costs to run
Put in your own volume →| KognitCapture | Amazon Textract | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence shape | One annual licence per installation, by turnover band; unlimited pages | Pay per page, no floor |
| Typical annual outlay | Licence from €900 + your infrastructure and team | ≈ $3k at 2M pages, text only |
| Marginal cost per page | €0 local · tokens only if you choose a remote model | $1.50 – $15 per 1k pages |
| Who runs it | You do, on your own hardware | You build and own the platform |
Moving from Amazon Textract.
Keep Textract if you like it: it can sit behind the recognition step while this platform supplies everything around it. That is often the fastest way to stop the internal build without throwing away work.
Read the migration brief →Questions buyers ask us about Amazon Textract
01Our developers say they can wire this up in a sprint.
The recognition call, yes. The forty-odd capabilities around it — batch assembly, separator handling, template versioning, validation rules, an operator review UI, retries, retention, audit, tenant isolation, export mapping — are the sprint that never ends. Ask what happens when the person who wrote it leaves.
02Can we use Textract as an engine here?
Recognition is pluggable and the plugin SDK exists for exactly this. Most teams end up local for volume and remote for the hard pages.
Compare against something else
All nine →Product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used for identification and comparison only. KognitCapture is not affiliated with any of them.