Tesseract is the canonical open-source OCR engine and is genuinely excellent on printed text. We include it as a baseline because "just use an open-source library" still gets suggested for handwriting in forum threads.
On handwriting the result was 95.4% WER: scattered fragments of recognisable letters surrounded by noise. That is not a fault so much as a category error, because Tesseract was trained for printed characters, not connected script.
If your input is printed and your budget is zero, Tesseract is a fine choice. For handwriting it is not a contender, and the gap between that forum suggestion and reality is enormous.