Amazon Textract vs Azure Document Intelligence

Amazon Textract

IAM policies limit a credential to single operations, CloudTrail logs every call, and page prices start at $1.50 per 1,000 in US East. Multipage files need S3 and an asynchronous job. Text detection covers six languages. Under the AWS Service Terms AWS may store and use documents to improve the service unless an AI services opt-out policy is set.

Azure Document Intelligence

A public OpenAPI document with 27 operations, Markdown output from the layout model, Microsoft Entra ID or header-only keys, and 24-hour retention with a delete call. Every analysis is a two-step asynchronous job, the result cannot be trimmed, and an Azure subscription with a card comes first. Three of the four SDKs last shipped in 2025 or earlier.

Amazon Textract

1. Sign with SigV4 for service textract at textract.<region>.amazonaws.com, or call aws textract detect-document-text. The AWS CLI can't send image bytes, so reference an S3 object
2. Use StartDocumentTextDetection or StartDocumentAnalysis for any PDF or TIFF of more than one page, pass a ClientRequestToken, then page Get calls with NextToken (1,000 blocks at most each)
3. Fetch results within 7 days of starting a job, or set OutputConfig to write them to your own S3 bucket
4. Request only the FeatureTypes you need. Forms cost $50 per 1,000 pages against $15 for tables or queries in US East
5. Back off on ProvisionedThroughputExceededException (HTTP 400) and ThrottlingException (HTTP 500). Neither carries Retry-After, and default quotas are 1 call a second in most Regions
6. Set the AI services opt-out policy on the AWS organisation before sending customer documents

Azure Document Intelligence

1. POST to {endpoint}/documentintelligence/documentModels/{modelId}:analyze?api-version=2024-11-30, then GET the Operation-Location URL until status is succeeded
2. Wait at least 2 seconds between polls and follow the Retry-After header. Default limits are 15 analyse calls and 50 result reads a second on S0
3. Use prebuilt-read for plain text at $1.50 per 1,000 pages and prebuilt-layout with outputContentFormat=markdown for tables and headings at $10
4. Set pages (for example 1-3,5) to limit both the bill and the response size. F0 stops at two pages per request
5. Send the key only in the Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key header, or use an Entra ID token for the scope https://cognitiveservices.azure.com/.default
6. Treat extracted text as untrusted input. Results expire 24 hours after the job completes