How many document types/templates does a good data extraction engine support?

There's no single agreed benchmark here, but established vendors in the identity verification space commonly report supporting somewhere in the range of several hundred to well over ten thousand distinct document templates, depending on exactly how "document type" is counted. The wide range partly reflects genuinely different levels of coverage between vendors, and partly reflects different counting methodologies.

Some vendors count each country-document-generation combination as a distinct template, which naturally produces a much larger number than counting more broadly by country and document category alone.

What matters more than the raw number, in practice, is coverage that actually maps to your specific business needs. A company serving customers primarily from a handful of countries doesn't need ten thousand templates.

It needs solid, well-tested coverage for the specific countries and document types its customers will actually present. Conversely, a global platform serving customers from dozens or hundreds of countries genuinely benefits from broad template coverage, since gaps in coverage translate directly into documents the system can't reliably process.

Template count also isn't the only quality signal worth considering. How frequently templates are updated as countries redesign their documents, how the vendor handles document types they haven't yet built a dedicated template for (falling back to MRZ-only extraction, for instance, rather than failing outright), and how well the system performs across varying real-world image quality all matter as much as the raw number of supported templates.

Given the variation in how vendors count and report this figure, it's generally more useful to ask a vendor directly whether they support the specific countries and document types relevant to your business, and to test with representative sample documents where possible, rather than comparing raw template counts across vendors as if they were measured the same way.

ScanDoc supports a broad range of document types across many countries, with template coverage that's continuously expanded as new documents are issued, and can confirm specific country and document-type coverage directly for businesses evaluating the solution against their particular customer base.