I know this has been asked elsewhere, however, I only need the highlight/highlight export feature as well as searchability within files (PDFs), which version do I need?
The OCR feature listed on the website is a little confusing which is why I’m asking.
Using any PDF viewer, DEVONthink’s included, to make the searching work must be a so-called “text-layer” in the PDF. For scanned documents, that done by OCR.
If your incoming PDF’s that are scans were “OCR-ed” by someone else or another tool you have, then you don’t need DEVONthink‘s OCR featurres.
I’d like to add that when you create PDFs from web pages using macOS’ Print to PDF feature these PDFs normally have text layers you can search, highlight etc. If you do this a lot the standard version might suffice.
On the other hand I’d strongly recommend to intensively check the non-standard features in DEVONthink’s trial version. The pro version has some easily overlooked but extremely useful features like custom meta data.
If you still are uncertain go for the standard version—you can upgrade anytime later for just the price difference between the two versions.