Microsoft Office Lens (opens in a new tab) is specifically designed to capture images from whiteboards, notes, and documents, which can then be saved as PDF, Word, or PowerPoint files. These can then be stored in the cloud via OneNote or OneDrive. Office Lens is free and doesn`t come with any ads, but integrates better with the paid Microsoft 365 Office suite. Just like FineScanner, you can upload scanned documents to a range of cloud storage platforms, including Dropbox, Evernote, Expensify, Facebook, Google Drive, OneDrive (and OneDrive for Business), OneNote, FTP, SugarSync, and WebDAV. Genius Scan is another great scanning option for both Android and iOS users. You don`t need to tap anything to capture. The app does this automatically for you, so you can easily scan documents on Android and iOS. After scanning your document, contract, or note, you can export it as a multi-page JPEG or PDF. The app uses a smart page recognition feature to correct perspective and enhance images for you. If you want to get the best possible OCR from a mobile app, consider ABBYY FineScanner (available for Android and iOS).
It is extraordinarily good, still more accurate than Adobe Scan, Microsoft Office Lens and SwiftScan. But you pay a high price for this accuracy, and the application is overall limited in scanning anything other than text documents. Like SwiftScan, FineScanner is available in subscription and preview (in this case, regular and pro). Functionally, they are identical, but the regular version requires a monthly or annual subscription, while the Pro version costs $60 upfront with no recurring fees. For Android, we also tested Clear Scan, but found that the interface wasn`t as neat as our selection due to the lack of automatic document recognition and capture, a batch scanning mode, and the ability to OCR an entire document at a time. This made it harder for us to get high-quality scans. PDFelement for iOS is the best PDF scanner for iOS 14/13/12/11/10/9/8/7. The tool offers many advantages that allow you to manage your PDF files. For example, you can scan notes, receipts, and business cards and convert them to PDF. You can also store and share PDF files via cloud services and transfer files to your computer via Wi-Fi.
Genius Scan (Android, iOS) is a very good fully functional scanning app for iOS and Android, but we had some issues with the OCR capability in our last test. The iOS version struggled with spaces, so when you pull text from a PDF, you get a largely continuous string, and the Android version of the app had no OCR at all. However, the latest version of Genius Scan has added OCR for Android users, so we plan to test it again on our next major update. TinyScan Pro is an easy-to-use scanning app for iPad and iPhone. It uses your iOS device`s camera to scan documents. It scans PDFs, notes, and receipts, and lets you save them to Dropbox, Camera Roll, Box, Evernote, and Google Drive via email. You can also print them with AirPrint, fax them via Tiny Fax, and share them to your PC over Wi-Fi. In addition, you can protect your documents with a password.
With SwiftScan, you can scan multi-page documents, edit and annotate elements, and enhance images with colors and filters. You can connect to a variety of cloud services, including iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box, as well as Evernote, Slack, and Todoist. As for the scanning, it had some accuracy issues, but overall not too shabby. The prices on the receipt – which other apps had pulled well – were wrong here. On the other hand, the certificate performed much better, with Adobe capturing most of the text, except for the “Certificate of Completion” title above. What`s interesting is that the book ended up being the most accurate: there were a handful of errors with some words, but for the most part, the text was correct enough to decipher. For iOS users, Scanner Pro is an outstanding and complete document scanner. You can scan items with your iPhone or iPad, then email, export, save, or upload them to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneNote, iCloud Drive, and other WebDAV-enabled online storage services. When it comes to scanning documents for digital file storage, you`ll probably want to save them in a portable document format – a PDF file. Adobe Scan is a dedicated scanning application from Adobe, the creators of the PDF file, so expectations are high that it should meet most of the needs of users. The other side of that means that the app is pretty naked.
Microsoft Lens doesn`t put much emphasis on file management. There is no way to create folders or sort and filter your scans. Once I finished editing my documents, the app on iPhone took me directly to the export options, which included saving the document to the iPhone Photos app or other compatible apps.