The best scanner app on mobile

Posted by Campbell Bird on February 13th, 2016
iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad

People always say that the best camera is the one you have with you. Well, the same is true with scanners, and your phone can be a pretty great tool for scanning receipts and other documents while you're on the go.

Check out the list below to discover the ultimate scanner app and a few honourable mentions.


The best

CamScanner - PDF Scanner App

iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad
Released: 2010-08-28 :: Category: Game

FREE!

Out of all the scanner apps tested, CamScanner won out at the best pick because of its ability to recognize documents and its fantastic OCR functionality.

When taking photos of almost any document - even if oddly shaped or taken at a strange angle -CamScanner did a great job of figuring out what it was you were trying to capture and crop it appropriately.

Add to that the ability to make any scanned document searchable by text using its OCR functionality and the ability to connect to a whole host of cloud services, and CamScanner is a killer scanning app.

The rest

Evernote Scannable

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2015-01-08 :: Category: Game

FREE!

Evernote Scannable is a great scanning app primarily because it is dead simple to use. All you have to do it point your phone camera at something, and the app largely takes care of the rest. Evernote Scannable also earns some bonus points for being among the best scanner apps at capturing light text on documents.

Although it is an Evernote product, you don't necessarily have to be invested in the Evernote platform to make use of this app, but features that CamScanner has (particularly OCR) aren't available unless you're an Evernote Premium member.

FineReader: PDF Scanner & OCR

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2012-07-24 :: Category: Game

FREE!

FineScanner rounds out this list because it is also a free and high quality scanner. It isn't quite as good edge detection as the others, though there are built-in editing tools to overcome that. Also, features like OCR support and more are available, but they only come into play with a premium subscription.

What makes FineScanner stand out though is the workflow of the app itself. Each scan is sent through a linear process for dealing with it, which makes it a very straightforward and efficient scanning app.

Are there other scanning apps we didn't detect? Scan and send us your picks in the comments!

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