Smartphones are the Swiss Army knives of the digital world, and mobile scanning apps are one of the best examples of why. Using your phone’s camera, these apps can scan and extract text from virtually any document—plus whiteboards, books, and more—while automatically correcting for distortion and skew. After spending more than 50 hours researching 22 scanning apps and testing 13 of them, our favorite is the lean, efficient, and free-to-use Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS ). It’s simple to use, capable of beautiful scan quality, and equipped with excellent text-recognition capabilities.
Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS) is great at capturing the sort of documents life throws at you every once in a while—stuff like rebate forms, tax documents, and the occasional business card. It isn’t as complex or as powerful as our upgrade pick, SwiftScan, but it’s free, simple to use, and produces scans that look even better than those from other top scanning apps. It automatically stores every scan you capture on Adobe Document Cloud, which means your scans are accessible from any phone, tablet, or computer. And Adobe Scan’s useful dedicated scanning modes mean you can add new contacts from business cards and fill out forms right on your device. An optional Premium subscription at $10 per month offers extra storage, allows you to export scans to Word and Excel files, and adds the ability to extract text from even longer documents, but we think SwiftScan is a better paid option.
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SwiftScan’s paid versions (SwiftScan Pro for Android and SwiftScan VIP for iOS) provide more features and customization than our other picks, including custom folders for better organization, smart file naming, iCloud syncing, and automatic uploading to your choice of more than a dozen cloud storage services. SwiftScan produces good-looking scans across a variety of document types, and it can perform optical character recognition (OCR) in dozens of languages without uploading your documents to the cloud. These text-recognition results are very accurate, if not quite best in class. However, given the subscription model—$5 per month or $25 per year for Android users and $8 per month or $40 per year for iPhone owners—we think it only makes sense for people who would use its extra features on a regular basis.
If you like the idea of Adobe Scan’s simplicity and zero-dollar price tag but spend a lot of time working in the Microsoft Office suite, then Microsoft Lens (for Android and iOS) is the way to go. Its user interface is similarly sparse, but the output options include Word documents and PowerPoint slides in addition to PDFs. Its scans don’t look as clean as what you can get from Adobe Scan, Apple Notes, or SwiftScan, and you may find its sharing options annoyingly limited. But its excellent text recognition and well-formatted output almost make up for those drawbacks.
If you’re an iPhone user, you’re probably also an Apple Notes user. But you might not know that in addition to being a great place to jot down important info, it’s also a surprisingly powerful mobile scanning app. Like Adobe Scan, it automatically saves all of your scans to the cloud—in this case, iCloud—so you can access them on multiple devices, and it performs extremely accurate OCR by default. If you have an iPhone and are just scanning the occasional lunch receipt, business card, or homework assignment, you probably don’t need another app. But despite its pluses, Notes does have a few shortcomings: It can’t export searchable PDFs, it has a limited range of OCR languages, and it can only export PDFs and raw text.
