Best Mobile Scanner Apps

Scanner Apps	Pricing
CamScanner	Free / $4.99 monthly
Scanbot	Free / $7.99
Evernote Scannable	Free
Microsoft Office Lens	Free
Scanner Pro	Free / $4.99
Genius Scan	Free / $7.99
Google Drive	Free
Adobe Scan	Free
Tiny Scanner	Free / $0.99
Turbo Scan	Free / $0.99

What to Look for in the Best Mobile Scanner Apps

Numerous scanner apps are available in the market. We explore their characteristics and the people whose needs they best suit.

James Bond carries a hidden high-definition camera in his pocket to take pictures of top-secret documents. However, since we all carry high-definition cameras these days, you can take, scan, and store critical documents in addition to pictures wherever you go despite not being 007. These are the best features to search for in a mobile scanner app to store, not agitate, your documents.

Operating Systems

If the mobile scanner app is compatible with your phone, that should be one of the first considerations when choosing one. It’s amazing how many scanner apps are limited to working with iOS or Android. Nonetheless, iOS and Android users can use a number of the best scanner apps, such as Adobe Scan, Microsoft Office Lens, Genius Scan, and ScanBot.

Cost

Although prices for mobile scanner apps range from free to about $8 per month, you probably won’t have to pay a lot for them. Both Adobe Scan and Evernote Scannable are available for free. Freemium mobile scanner apps are available that offer basic features for free, but charge for additional features. Whereas Genius Scan, ScanBot, and Scanner Pro are all paid apps with no free versions, CamScanner and Tiny Scanner are freemium.

Scanning Speed

The amount of milliseconds it takes to scan an item can matter if you plan to use your mobile scanner app to scan multiple images at once or to capture numerous documents for work. Evernote Scannable may be the fastest mobile scanner app available—it even performs faster than the online image capture tool. It doesn’t take long at all to identify, scan, crop, and save whatever you point it at.

Although Genius Scan is a straightforward mobile scanner with few fancy features, it does its job quickly and effectively. Without requiring a click, it quickly identifies the document in front of it, lines up the edges, and moves on.

Easy to Use

You don’t want to spend time figuring it out when you pull out your scanner app. Whether you’re managing work projects or keeping track of expenses, having an app that is simple to use and intuitive is crucial. Anyone who wants to download the app, point it, and go should consider Scanbot. You don’t need to refer to the instructions to understand how to use the interface because it is simple and self-explanatory, and the automatic settings work so well that you won’t even need to try the manual mode. CamScanner is an additional user-friendly option. Its smart automatic settings and easy-to-use interface should require little, if any, adjusting.

Clarity of Text

The text quality won’t be too important if all you’re doing is taking pictures of receipts to keep track of your spending. However, you’ll need a mobile scanner app with strong OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities to edit and save text for professional use. The most readable and unambiguous version of contracts must be captured for signature and preservation. The best text capture quality is offered by Scanner Pro. It can correct twisted or squashed papers, glare from whiteboards, and text distortion from curved pages. The OCR text recognition feature of Scanner Pro produces readable and editable text with remarkable efficiency.

Microsoft Office Lens is another excellent choice for readable documents. It excels at creating readable, clear documents in PDF or JPG format and can quickly and simply convert them to editable.doc format. Office Lens is effective at clearing muddy backgrounds from documents, cards, and images. It can handle whiteboard text and straighten photos and pages that have been scanned at an angle, but it cannot fix curved pages.

Turbo Scan is a straightforward mobile scanner with good image quality despite not having many bells and whistles. Though, unfortunately, it doesn’t support OCR text recognition, it works well enough to safely and store images of notes, business cards, documents, and whiteboard text. Turbo Scan produces the greatest image possible, even in dimly lit areas or with hazy text.

Storage Options

It helps to have some options for sharing and storing your scanned documents after you’ve finished scanning them. One clear benefit of Google Drive is that you can save your photos there right away and share them with any Google contact. The ability to easily access your scanned files from any device is a huge productivity boost. Moreover, you can forward them via Dropbox or email.

Both Scanbot and Scanner Pro provide an enormous amount of storage and sharing options. You can store your scanned documents on Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, iCloudFree, and Yandex.Disk using Scanbot. Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, OneNote, and even any WebDav server are all compatible with Scanner Pro.

Security

Even though you’re not James Bond and aren’t defending top-secret documents, you might still want to know that contracts, private information, and sensitive documents are safe from hackers or uninvited partners. When emailing a link to a scanned document, CamScanner allows you to add an expiration date and password protection. You can encrypt your scanned document as a PDF with Genius Scan, which provides an additional layer of security. Password or passcode protection is another feature that both Scanbot and Tiny Scanner offer for PDFs.

Features

Aside from these diverse features, different mobile scanning apps offer additional features that may or may not be relevant to your needs, entertaining, or helpful. One example is the capability of numerous apps, such as Tiny Scanner and Evernote Scannable, to save documents as JPEG files in addition to PDF files. JPEGs have the advantage of being easier to edit than PDFs. You can even save text in Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote as a.doc file and export it fast to Microsoft Office Lens for fully functional editing.

CamScanner offers an add-on feature called in-app cloud printing. This eliminates the need for you to use a separate app to tag, edit, and annotate the document before sending it straight to be printed. You can fax documents directly from the CamScanner app, in addition to Tiny Scanner and Genius Scanner.

Pay-per-use add-ons from Genius Scan allow you to automatically extract data from scanned receipts and store it in your expense tracking app. One such integration is with Expensify. Additionally, the Genius Scan Sign App is available for purchase. With it, you can sign scanned contracts directly within the app without having to modify the text in any other way.

One feature of Evernote Scannable is its LinkedIn connection. It can recognize business cards and extract contact information during the scan, then connect that data with the subject’s LinkedIn profile, making it easy to keep track of new contacts.

Finally, convenient labeling, organizing, tagging, and annotation of scanned documents makes it easier to manage and retrieve them when you need them. Scanbot enables users to easily tag, note, and draw on their scanned documents so that they can save their responses in the same place as the original document.

Scan and Save in One

There is a mobile scanner app that doesn’t break the bank for scanning, saving, and protecting your documents—whether you’re keeping track of your spending, preserving work documents, or even acting as a secret agent.