Our decide
Free and refreshingly easy, Adobe Scan is one of the best app when all you want is clear PDFs and dependable textual content recognition.
Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS) is nice at capturing the kind of paperwork life throws at you each infrequently—stuff like rebate varieties, tax paperwork, and the occasional enterprise card. It isn’t as advanced or as highly effective as our improve decide, SwiftScan, but it surely’s free, easy to make use of, and produces scans that look even higher than these from different high scanning apps. It robotically shops each scan you seize on Adobe Doc Cloud, which implies your scans are accessible from any cellphone, pill, or laptop. And Adobe Scan’s helpful devoted scanning modes imply you’ll be able to add new contacts from enterprise playing cards and fill out varieties proper in your machine. An non-obligatory Premium subscription at $10 monthly gives further storage, permits you to export scans to Phrase and Excel recordsdata, and provides the flexibility to extract textual content from even longer paperwork, however we predict SwiftScan is a greater paid possibility.
Improve decide
The paid variations of SwiftScan present further options and sharing choices that make it a extra versatile, highly effective app than our different picks.
SwiftScan’s paid variations (SwiftScan Professional for Android and SwiftScan VIP for iOS) present extra options and customization than our different picks, together with customized folders for higher group, good file naming, iCloud syncing, and computerized importing to your alternative of greater than a dozen cloud storage providers. SwiftScan produces handsome scans throughout a wide range of doc sorts, and it might carry out optical character recognition (OCR) in dozens of languages with out importing your paperwork to the cloud. These text-recognition outcomes are very correct, if not fairly finest in school. Nonetheless, given the subscription mannequin—$5 monthly or $25 per 12 months for Android customers and $8 monthly or $40 per 12 months for iPhone homeowners—we predict it solely is smart for individuals who would use its further options regularly.
Additionally nice
Lens is particularly good in the event you use Microsoft’s Workplace suite, but it surely’s a stable possibility for anybody who desires free scanning with (principally) correctly formatted OCR outcomes.
If you happen to like the concept of Adobe Scan’s simplicity and zero-dollar price ticket however spend numerous time working within the Microsoft Workplace suite, then Microsoft Lens (for Android and iOS) is the way in which to go. Its person interface is equally sparse, however the output choices embrace Phrase paperwork and PowerPoint slides along with PDFs. Its scans don’t look as clear as what you will get from Adobe Scan, Apple Notes, or SwiftScan, and you might discover its sharing choices annoyingly restricted. However its glorious textual content recognition and well-formatted output virtually make up for these drawbacks.
Additionally nice
Apple Notes isn’t only for celeb apologies: It’s additionally nice at capturing primary scans of paperwork, whiteboards, and extra—and it produces a number of the cleanest OCR outcomes we’ve ever seen.
If you happen to’re an iPhone person, you’re in all probability additionally an Apple Notes person. However you won’t know that along with being an awesome place to jot down necessary information, it’s additionally a surprisingly highly effective cell scanning app. Like Adobe Scan, it robotically saves your entire scans to the cloud—on this case, iCloud—so you’ll be able to entry them on a number of units, and it performs extraordinarily correct OCR by default. In case you have an iPhone and are simply scanning the occasional lunch receipt, enterprise card, or homework task, you in all probability don’t want one other app. However regardless of its pluses, Notes does have a couple of shortcomings: It may’t export searchable PDFs, it has a restricted vary of OCR languages, and it might solely export PDFs and uncooked textual content.
