A technology lead at a federal aerospace agency spent $30,000 on Nanonets. The promise was plug-and-play document processing for millions of government records — structured forms, unstructured reports, handwritten notes from field teams. What he got was something else entirely.
“We paid that 30 grand and it was supposed to be plug and play,” he said. “It is absolutely one of the worst. You might as well create your own Streamlit application and have OpenAI do the OCR for you.”
If you’re a government agency evaluating Nanonets alternatives, this story probably sounds familiar. The platform demos well on clean digital PDFs, but government document processing is rarely clean. Here’s what goes wrong, what to look for in a replacement, and how agencies are solving it.
Lido is the strongest Nanonets alternative for government agencies processing millions of pages across hundreds of document formats. It extracts data from any document layout — including handwritten forms, scanned records, and legacy government paperwork — without model training, retraining cycles, or per-format configuration. Government teams using Lido eliminate the failed extraction charges and constant model maintenance that make Nanonets unworkable at agency scale.
Government document processing has specific challenges that expose Nanonets’ limitations faster than most commercial use cases.
Government agencies deal with handwritten forms, field notes, and annotated documents at a scale most industries don’t. Federal employees, inspectors, and field teams still write by hand — and Nanonets struggles with anything beyond clean, standardized print. The aerospace agency’s technology lead had tried multiple tools before Nanonets, including Unstructured.io, and found that handwriting recognition was consistently the breaking point across every platform he tested.
Nanonets markets itself as a no-code platform. In practice, government teams discover that setup requires building custom models, training them on document samples, and configuring extraction rules — work that looks a lot like coding even if it technically isn’t.
The aerospace agency lead was blunt about this: “I’m looking for drag and drop by definition instead of having to go through these loopholes that all of these other no-code automation platforms don’t tell you about.”
For agencies without dedicated ML engineering teams — which is most of them — the gap between “no-code” marketing and actual implementation is a serious problem.
When Nanonets gets an extraction wrong, you pay to try again. Every reprocessing attempt consumes credits. For government agencies processing thousands of documents with inconsistent quality — scanned copies, faxed forms, photographed field reports — failed extractions aren’t edge cases. They’re a significant percentage of volume.
The aerospace agency’s technology lead flagged this as a critical differentiator when evaluating alternatives: “That reprocessing feature allows us to take a second chance without being charged a credit — that’s what really bit Nanonets.”
Government agencies receive documents from hundreds of sources — other agencies, contractors, state and local entities, international partners — each with different formats. Nanonets requires training a model for each document type, then retraining when formats change. For agencies dealing with thousands of format variations, this creates a permanent maintenance burden.
This isn’t an isolated problem. Across government and enterprise, teams processing hundreds of thousands of documents through Nanonets hit the same retraining wall — the AI label on the product doesn’t eliminate the per-format configuration burden, it just changes the form it takes.
Government document processing has requirements that most commercial IDP tools aren’t designed for:
More Nanonets comparisons: See our full Nanonets vs. Lido comparison for a detailed feature and pricing breakdown. Also read how Lido replaces Nanonets for energy companies, or explore the best Nanonets alternatives roundup.
Lido takes a fundamentally different approach than Nanonets. Instead of training models per document type, Lido uses AI-powered extraction that adapts to any document layout automatically. No templates, no model training, no retraining when formats change.
Lido offers 50 free pages with no credit card required. Test with your actual government documents — the handwritten ones, the scanned copies, the messy field reports — and see the difference before committing budget.
Lido is the strongest Nanonets alternative for government agencies because it handles handwriting extraction, requires no model training, and includes free 24-hour reprocessing at every pricing tier. A technology lead at a federal aerospace agency spent $30,000 on Nanonets and called it “absolutely one of the worst,” specifically citing handwriting failures and reprocessing charges. Lido processes any document format with AI only, requires no templates or model training, and is SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Yes. Lido extracts data from handwritten text, mixed print-and-cursive annotations, and degraded scanned documents. Government agencies frequently process field notes, inspection forms, and handwritten records that template-based tools like Nanonets cannot handle. Lido’s AI-powered extraction adapts to irregular handwriting without requiring model training or template configuration.
No. Lido includes free reprocessing within 24 hours at every pricing tier, from the $29 per month Standard plan through Enterprise. Nanonets charges credits for every extraction attempt, including failures. For government agencies processing documents with inconsistent quality, free reprocessing eliminates the compounding cost of failed first-pass extractions.
Lido is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and HIPAA compliant. All documents are processed entirely by AI with no human crowd workers involved. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Unlike platforms that use human-in-the-loop crowd workers for quality assurance, Lido keeps all document data within its secure infrastructure without external human access.
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