The Best Mobile Scanning Apps

I’ve been writing about imaging gear—including cameras, printers, and scanners—for more than a decade, and I’ve been using smartphone scanning apps for nearly as long. Wirecutter has been covering scanners since 2013, spending more than 170 total hours on research and testing to find the best of the best. The knowledge we’ve picked up along the way has informed our testing of these mobile scanning apps.

Virtually anyone can benefit from having a scanning app on their phone, and for most people it can completely replace a physical scanner. Don’t get us wrong—there are plenty of specific tasks for which it still makes sense to own a scanner. But if you need one, you almost certainly know already. (Hello, CPAs and tax lawyers.) If you find yourself merely wondering whether you need one, the answer is almost certainly no.

That may come as a surprise, but thanks to rapidly improving smartphone cameras, today’s scanning apps are perfectly capable of handling once-in-a-while scanning needs: receipts, business cards, legal documents, or the occasional form. And because your phone can go almost anywhere you can, scanning apps can also go places physical scanners can’t. You can, for instance, use an app to quickly scan receipts at a business lunch, to capture pages from rare books at a library, or even to send in bills of lading and trip reports from big-rig trucks on long-haul routes.

Still not sure what you need?

Here’s a quick rundown of the major reasons why you might want a dedicated scanner, and which kind you need:

• If your work involves transcriptions, contracts, and other legal documents, you probably need highly accurate text recognition and an automatic document feeder to handle large jobs. You should look for a portable document scanner or an all-in-one printer with a scanner and an ADF.
• If you’re an avid photographer or scrapbooker and have a lot of photos to scan, you would probably prefer a purpose-built photo scanner.
• And if you’re after ultra-precise, high-resolution scans for archival work, you almost certainly need a flatbed scanner.

Otherwise, save yourself some money and give a scanning app a try.

You can find dozens upon dozens of mobile scanning apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, most of which have glowing reviews and attractive-sounding features. But as with most apps, a lot of them are junk.

To narrow the field, we isolated the traits we think are most useful in a mobile scanning app:

• Ease of use: Above all else, scanning apps have to be easy to use, or else you won’t want to use them. We looked for apps with intuitive controls, a thoughtful layout, and helpful features such as automatic document recognition and capture.
• Great image quality: Although the scan quality is partly dependent on the quality of your phone camera, it also has a lot to do with the app itself. Different apps provide different scan resolutions and different filters, some of which are better than others at smoothing out wrinkles, shadows, and other blemishes.
• Accurate text recognition: The best scanning apps use optical character recognition (OCR) to locate text in an image and convert it to an editable document. Some apps export raw text (either as a TXT file or copied to the clipboard), while others provide formatted text in RTF or DOC files. As usual, having more options is better.
• Ample sharing options: A good scanning app provides a convenient way to share your scans and OCR results on all the channels you like to use—email, Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack, printers, faxes, and more. If the app can automatically back up scans to cloud storage, all the better.
• Diverse format options: You’ll probably end up scanning text documents and receipts most of the time, but a good scanning app should also be adept at capturing less-common materials such as whiteboards, book pages, newspaper and magazine articles, and business cards.
• Attention to security: We were skeptical of apps that encourage you (or require you) to upload your scans to their own cloud servers for storage and OCR, as well as those that don’t provide clear security and privacy policies. At a bare minimum, we looked for a promise that apps won’t sell or share your data without consent.
• Annotation and editing features: Once you have a nice, clean scan, you might want to mark it up—place some Xs so your client knows where to sign, for instance, or highlight text, add notes, or even put your own signature on a contract.
• A reasonable price: We think most people don’t mind paying a little for a high-quality app, but we cast a skeptical eye on apps that demand a recurring subscription fee or have an unusually high up-front price, namely more than about $5. And of course we looked favorably upon any app that provides high-quality scanning and useful features for free.

For the original version of this guide, we tested six contenders for Android (ABBYY FineScanner, Clear Scan, Microsoft Office Lens, SwiftScan, and Smart Doc Scanner) and seven for iOS (ABBYY FineScanner, CamScanner, ClearScanner, Microsoft Office Lens, Prizmo, SwiftScan, and Scanner Pro).

For the summer 2019 update, we checked all of the above apps again and added Adobe Scan (Android, iOS) and Genius Scan (Android, iOS).

We downloaded each Android app using a Google Pixel XL and each iOS app on an Apple iPhone 8. Where freeware versions were available, we took stock of what functionality was available without our upgrading to a “Pro” or “Premium” version of the app. This step was especially important since we hoped to recommend a free or freeware app for each platform.

Then we grabbed the paid versions of the apps and got down to serious scanning. Using each app, we scanned two documents—a standard IRS 1099 tax form (PDF) and a simple text document with the same sentence repeated in descending font size from 12 to 4 points—three times each in order to test OCR accuracy and consistency. Where cloud-based OCR was available, we tried that feature to see if it offered a noticeable improvement over on-device text recognition. We scanned the 1099 form again to check out each app’s batch-scanning mode, taking note of any hitches in the process and how easy it was to reorder or recapture specific pages. Then we scanned a handwritten note, a whiteboard, a business card, a page from a book, and both glossy and matte photos to see how the apps handled different kinds of source material.

During all of this scanning, we kept detailed notes on the quality of each app’s edge detection, automatic cropping, and image filter performance. Once we had the scans in hand, we spent time playing with the annotation and editing options in order to see how extensively each app could manipulate the images it captured.

Finally, we spent significant time going through the apps’ sharing options, looking for snags that might catch you out, such as an inability to directly share certain file types, a lack of automatic uploading, or a limited selection of sharing channels.

Our pick

Adobe Scan

The best scanning app

Free and refreshingly straightforward, Adobe Scan is the perfect app if all you need is clean PDFs and reliable text recognition.

Buying Options

Buy from Google Play

Buy from Apple App Store

If, like most people, you just need to occasionally create clean-looking PDFs of physical documents—and do it for free—we think there’s no better option than Adobe Scan (Android, iOS). Adobe Scan’s simple design and limited options may initially seem like a negative in comparison with the features in more complex apps like SwiftScan and CamScanner, but we found in practice that the app’s simplicity made it easier to get the results we wanted. Adobe Scan produced the cleanest-looking scans in our test group, from text docs to photos. It also has the ability to fill in scanned forms (with the help of other free apps in the Adobe ecosystem), and it provides excellent text recognition, too. And it automatically stores all of your scans in Adobe’s cloud, at no additional cost.

Adobe Scan’s layout is as simple as they come. When you fire up the app, it dumps you right into the camera view so you can quickly capture the document in front of you. Here you’ll find dedicated modes for whiteboards, forms, documents, and business cards. You can also toggle auto-capture, choose from several flash options, and import documents or images that are already on your device for OCR.

The app can handily capture a single scan or dozens in a row; you tell it when to stop scanning and then proceed to add the finishing touches. This process differs slightly from that of other apps (like SwiftScan) that have a dedicated multipage mode, but in practice it makes little difference. When you do proceed to the editing screen, you can apply one of four filters, adjust the automatic crop, rotate the image, reorder multipage scans, or add more pages. The library view is simple, showing either a grid or a list of scans, sorted by name or date.

OCR is available in 19 of the most commonly spoken languages—fewer than in SwiftScan or ABBYY FineScanner, but sufficient for the needs of a huge percentage of the world population. It was very accurate in our testing, matching the class-leading FineScanner at typical font sizes with perfect results down to about 8 points. If OCR is extremely important to you, or if you scan a lot of especially fine text, you would get more accurate results from FineScanner or a hardware document scanner. However, both options are far more expensive than Adobe Scan.

Adobe’s auto-crop was reliably on point in our tests, with only occasional, minor adjustments required as long as we were scanning white pages on a darker surface. If you try to scan at crazy angles, or with a low-contrast background, you’ll need to adjust your crop lines. But Adobe helps you out there with a magnified view that makes it simple to pinpoint the corners of pages.

Unlike in some other apps we tested, Adobe Scan’s Auto Color filter actually retains accurate color and contrast (even in smaller text) while brightening white areas and getting rid of the shadows caused by creases. It was the only app we tested that was able to correctly render the photo of the dog in our standard office document. Whereas other apps stripped color out of the sky or the dog’s face, Adobe Scan produced natural color gradients throughout. It performed similarly well on photos, though with glossy prints we had to work hard to avoid glare. We don’t recommend using a scanning app for photo reproduction, but it’s nice that this one works in a pinch.

We loved Adobe’s Fill & Sign feature, which lets you scan a form and send it to the (also free) Acrobat Reader app for checking boxes, filling in fields with typewritten text, and signing with your finger (or a saved image of your signature). It’s quick and intuitive, and when I filled out a scanned rebate form for a recently purchased PC power supply, the printed results looked startlingly similar to the original document. If you have a downloaded form, you can even import it directly—rather than printing it and scanning it—to make the ultimate image quality even better.

All scans you capture with Adobe Scan save as PDFs, and the appy automatically uploads them to Adobe Document Cloud. You can also choose to share a copy of any PDF via the Android or iOS sharing menu, or send someone a link to download the file from Adobe Document Cloud. You can export any scan as a JPEG, too, in case you want to send it to someone via text message or upload to Instagram.

Although having a copy of every scan you make stored on Adobe’s servers may be a concern for the extremely security-conscious, we believe Adobe is one of the safest services you could use. Adobe provides a thorough rundown of its security policies (PDF) if you need reassurance. If you need a more secure storage option or just don’t like Adobe, consider an app (such as SwiftScan) that allows you to automatically upload each scan to the storage service of your choice.

Adobe Scan is refreshingly simple and direct, but that simplicity means it’s lacking a few extras that we’d like to see in our ideal scanning app. The most obvious limitation is that since the app is made by Adobe, it’s extremely PDF-oriented. You can also’t export scans as JPEGs, but there’s no option for Word docs or, TXT files for OCR’d text, or PowerPoint slides to help you create a presentation. The other thing is that the only cloud storage option is, yep, Adobe Document Cloud. Sure, you can individually upload scans to any other cloud storage app you have on your device, but we’d prefer it if Adobe let you set up automatic uploads to, say, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, and other popular services.

And speaking of the cloud, it would be great if the cloud uploads were optional. As it stands, every scan you make in Adobe Scan automatically uploads to Adobe’s servers, which could be a concern for the most security-conscious people. When you’re scanning things like personal financial records, legal documents, and business contracts, you want to be sure nefarious outside interests can’t access those files.

File management in Adobe Scan is limited, and the search function indexes only the names of the scans (which you have to manually edit). Other, more powerful scanning apps, like SwiftScan, let you create folders to organize your scans, offer smart file naming, and can index the OCR-captured contents of each scan instead of just the title.

Also great

Microsoft Office Lens

If you need to export formatted text

Office Lens is especially good if you use Microsoft Office, but it’s a solid option for anyone who wants free scanning with (mostly) properly formatted OCR results.

Buying Options

Buy from Apple App Store

Buy from Google Play

While Adobe Scan is focused almost entirely on PDFs, Microsoft Office Lens (available for Android and iOS) is unsurprisingly geared toward working with Microsoft’s Office suite. The app generates reliably excellent OCR results and can export them as fully formatted Word or RTF files in addition to the usual searchable PDFs. When you’re scanning business cards, it can recognize and export the contact info to OneNote, and its whiteboard mode can generate PowerPoint slides. Its image filters aren’t as effective as Adobe Scan’s, though, and it lacks a form-filling feature like the handy Fill & Sign, so unless you really need the Office-specific output formats, we think Adobe Scan is a better choice.

Office Lens’s layout is straightforward, with few distractions. It opens directly to the camera and offers a quartet of scanning modes along the bottom of the screen: Whiteboard, Document, Business Card, and Photo. The app automatically recognizes documents and outlines them with an orange box, but it has no auto-capture functionality; you have to hit the shutter button yourself. After you capture the scan, the app auto-crops it and gives you the option to add text overlays or to use a pen tool to annotate it.

Office Lens performs OCR automatically on Word and PDF exports. The results we got in DOCX format were excellent: well-formatted and accurate down to about 6 points, making Office Lens more accurate than SwiftScan, on a par with Adobe Scan, and close to what you’d get from the class-leading ABBYY FineScanner. The only catch with the OCR in Office Lens is that you have to install Word (it’s free) to access the DOCX output on your mobile device. (Alternatively, you can use the PDF output and open it with your default PDF reader, but in that case you’re better off with Adobe Scan.) Once you’ve opened your file in Word, you can share it through any app you like. (Note that you need to sign in to Word with a free Microsoft account in order to edit and save your OCR files.)

The scans we got from Office Lens didn’t look quite as clean as those from rival scanning apps. Whites weren’t as bright, the filters weren’t very good at getting rid of shadows, and the auto-crop tended to leave slivers of the background around the piece of paper. (It occasionally whiffed entirely, as well, including a huge swath of my desktop.) You can adjust the crop, but unlike other scanning apps, Office Lens doesn’t provide a magnified view for pinpoint adjustments.

Like Adobe Scan, Office Lens is laser-focused on its particular ecosystem, and is thus short on extras. File management is pretty much nonexistent, it offers no option to password-protect files, and it has no way to automatically upload scans to other cloud storage services.

Upgrade pick

SwiftScan

Expensive but powerful

SwiftScan's extra features and sharing options make it a more versatile, powerful app than Adobe Scan or Office Lens. But that versatility comes at a cost, especially for iOS users.

Buying Options

Buy from Google Play

Buy from Apple App Store

SwiftScan (available for Android and iOS) combines excellent scan quality and solid OCR results with a logical, easy-to-use layout. It also offers more extras than Adobe Scan and Microsoft Office Lens—stuff like file organization, advanced file-naming templates, additional PDF-markup features, automatic uploads to various cloud services, and PDF encryption. However, the iOS version of SwiftScan relies on subscription pricing ($6 per month or $35 per year) that makes it vastly more expensive than Adobe and Microsoft’s free apps. The more affordable Android app, meanwhile, doesn’t require a subscription but lacks some of the iOS version’s features. Either way, unless you really need some of its added features, we don’t think SwiftScan is worth choosing over our other picks.

Most scanning apps have similar layouts, but SwiftScan’s is our favorite thanks to its elegant simplicity. When you fire it up, it automatically opens the camera and captures the document in front of you. (If you prefer, you can set it to go to your library instead, and you can turn auto-capture off.) We also like its dedicated multipage scanning mode, its reminders to rotate the camera for landscape documents, and its prompts to square up your scans when there’s too much perspective distortion. However, it’s missing one thing we like in Adobe Scan and Microsoft Office Lens: dedicated modes for different content types. SwiftScan does have a unique feature called Actions that analyzes OCR results and extracts actionable elements such as URLs and email addresses, but we found that feature only marginally useful in practice.

The captured document goes to the editing screen, where you can apply an array of filters, adjust the automatic crop, rotate it, and name the scanned file. (You can also set up a custom naming template, if you don’t want to name your documents each time you scan.) The library view is straightforward, grouping your scans by capture date. From there, you can tap into each scan, view the recognized text, annotate the PDF, and share it. You can also create folders to better organize your scans—a feature no other scanning app we tested offers—and you have an option to make folders show up at the top of the library view. (Folders are available only in the iOS version of SwiftScan, however.)

SwiftScan performs automatic OCR on every scan, and can do so in 104 languages in the Android app and 60 in the iOS app (including options like Cherokee and Middle French). In our testing, its results were nowhere near as accurate as what we’d get from a hardware document scanner but still ranked near the top of the pack for scanning apps. ABBYY FineScanner and, to a lesser extent, Adobe Scan and Microsoft Office Lens still outclass it, but SwiftScan is fine for quick OCR work.

The auto-cropping functionality was reliably excellent, producing clean edges and straight text. In the rare cases when it messes up, SwiftScans cropping tool snaps to the detected edges of documents and has a magnified view to help you precisely place the corners. The two “Magic” image filters—Magic Color and Magic Text—reliably enhanced contrast and eliminated shadows and creases in our scans, leaving clean, white backgrounds and clear, readable text. SwiftScan also did a better job with photos than most apps, with the Color filter producing natural colors and contrast even as it removed shadows and other aberrations. We don’t recommend using scanning apps for photo reproduction, but we like that this one works in a pinch.

SwiftScan lets you share scans via email with one touch (PDF only), or you can tap the Share button to bring up the familiar Android or iOS share menu (PDF or JPEG). You can also share OCR results as a TXT file or copy it to your clipboard. In addition, you can configure SwiftScan to automatically upload all scans (again, PDF only) to one of 17 cloud services, including popular storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive; note-taking apps like OneNote and Evernote; and more esoteric options such as FTP servers and WebDAV. Finally, you can send your scans as a fax, but that costs extra—each page costs one “credit,” and you can buy credits individually or in packs of 10 (about $7) to 100 (about $35), with increasing volume discounts.

Unlike some competing apps, SwiftScan doesn’t send any of your data to its own servers or perform OCR in the cloud, so it presents a minimal security risk. If you’re an iOS user, it also offers PDF encryption, allowing you to password-protect your files.

One caveat: Although we think SwiftScan is great on both iOS and Android, the Android version lacks several options that iOS users enjoy. In addition to PDF encryption, other iOS-exclusive features include passcode and fingerprint app locks and in-app folders. SwiftScan’s new owners, Maple Media, tell us that they are working to bring feature parity to the Android app, but thus far they haven’t closed the gap much.

If you prefer a one-time purchase instead of a monthly subscription, SwiftScan is also available as SwiftScan+ for $100 up front for iOS users, or $10 for Android users. On iOS that works out to less than three times the cost of a yearly SwiftScan subscription. People who buy SwiftScan+ at this higher one-time cost still get access to new features that are added in the future, so if you expect to use the app for more than three years, this purchase may be the more cost-effective route.

Recently, global cybersecurity company Kapersky Lab revealed that the Android version of CamScanner—a popular competitor to our upgrade pick, SwiftScan—contained code from a malicious ad network that infected users’ devices with Trojan malware. This Trojan could serve to deploy other malware and potentially display other unwanted ads or even steal money from mobile accounts. CamScanner has since been removed from the Google Play Store. We tested the app back in 2018 and found it to be an extremely powerful scanning tool but ultimately dismissed it over broader concerns regarding its privacy and security policies.

When we first tested the app, we spoke with David Templeton of the information security team of The New York Times and asked him to review CamScanner’s security policies. At the time, Templeton told us that of CamScanner and Scanbot (now called SwiftScan), he’d go with Scanbot. “In the InfoSec world, we prefer promises to be backed up by technology that would make it nigh impossible to break the promise,” he said. “Scanbot is making mostly verifiable promises, and CamScanner is requiring a lot of trust and faith.”

In addition, if you take advantage of CamScanner’s best, most distinctive features (its included cloud storage and cloud OCR), the app transmits the data to its own servers, which the Shanghai-based company’s privacy policy states “can be located in either China or any other country or district in accordance with our service demands.” Although you can disable the cloud backups and use local OCR, that negates two of the most compelling reasons to use this app in the first place. So even if CamScanner returns to Google Play with a clean bill of health, we can’t recommend it. Uploading sensitive personal information to a server in China—even one whose owners claim to use 256-bit AES encryption—is too risky in our eyes.

If you want the best possible OCR from a mobile app, consider ABBYY FineScanner (available for both Android and iOS). It’s exceedingly good—consistently more accurate than Adobe Scan, Microsoft Office Lens, and SwiftScan. But you pay a hefty price for that accuracy, and the app overall is limited in scanning anything other than text documents. Like SwiftScan, FineScanner is available in both subscription and up-front versions (in this case, regular and Pro). Functionally, they’re identical, but the regular version requires a monthly or yearly subscription while the Pro version is $60 up front with no recurring fee.

Genius Scan (Android, iOS) is a very good, full-featured scanning app for iOS and Android, but we had issues with its OCR capability when we last tested it. The iOS version had a hard time with spaces, so if you extracted text from a PDF you ended up with a largely continuous string of characters, and the Android version of the app didn’t have OCR at all. However, the latest version of Genius Scan has added OCR for Android users, so we plan to test it again during our next major update.

Smart Doc Scanner was our budget pick for Android in a previous version of this guide. It’s totally free (though you can pay to remove the few included ads), and it offers a well-rounded feature set, accurate auto-cropping, and diverse export options. Unfortunately, its OCR functionality is currently broken and has been for some time now; attempting to download OCR libraries returns a “server is not responding” error. Reviews on its Google Play Store page suggest that the developer has been unresponsive to inquiries, which leads us to believe the app may now be abandonware.

For Android, we also tested Clear Scan but found that its user interface wasn’t nearly as polished as that of our picks, lacking automatic document recognition and capture, a batch-scanning mode, and the ability to OCR an entire document at once. That made it more difficult for us to get quality scans.

For iOS, we tested Scanner Pro and liked its interface and performance with text documents, but we were disappointed with the results when scanning other types of media. We also checked out Prizmo, but its ugly, hard-to-work-with interface, its poor auto-cropping performance, its limited sharing options, and its unreliable filters turned us off.

We considered but ultimately chose not to test apps such as Dropbox Business and Evernote Scannable because they require you to commit to costly subscriptions to much broader services in order to unlock full scanning functionality (including OCR). But if you’re already a paying subscriber, or if you don’t care about OCR, these scanning apps are definitely worth checking out.

Apple Notes—included on all iOS devices—provides a simple scanning function with an easy-to-use cropping tool and four effective filters, but offers fewer features than our picks. For years it didn’t offer any OCR functionality, which made it an automatic dismissal for this guide. In iOS 13, Apple finally added OCR functionality to Notes, but it works a little differently than in other scanning apps. For one thing, it’s automatic: Notes recognizes all text in scanned images and makes it easily searchable from the iOS search bar, and since iOS Notes syncs to the Mac Notes app, you can also search your scans on your computer. But the OCR text can’t be exported as a text file or Word document; it’s only there to be indexed for search. That’s ultra-convenient when you just want to find the right scanned document, but not so useful if you actually need access to the raw text.

We also dismissed several otherwise highly rated apps that didn’t offer OCR, came up short on features, were clones of other apps, had suspect security policies, or cost much more than other, comparable options: Fast Scanner (Android, iOS), Notebloc (Android, iOS), Tiny Scanner (Android, iOS), and TurboScan (Android, iOS).