Nowadays your smartphone is closer to replacing just about every device you’ve learned to love over the past years. The iPhone probably being the most popular phone becomes so powerful when you discover some of the amazing apps available to download from its densely populated App Store. It’s amazing what developers have been able to create over the 9 years of the App Stores life and we know there’s no stopping with the rate technology grows each day.
The phone is now more a tool than a communication device. Because of its high-quality camera, some developers quickly vision how your phone could become a pocket scanner. Seeing that we basically do all our communication on the go a professional having a hand-held scanner could be extremely useful to instantly scan and send documents to clients and colleagues instantaneously, at the quality of a professional duplex machine that takes up as much as an entire desk in an office.
If you have been wondering what apps are out there, then you’ve come to the right place. Below are some of my favorite scanner apps, in no particular order, that I have come to use and love.
Scanbot
Currently this is my go-to scanner app and I’ll tell you why in a second but first check out some key features that make it so great.
Lighting Fast Automatic Scan
Scanbot makes it so easy to create a scan that upon opening the app, the scanner immediately opens to a camera view and begins searching for a document as you point your camera around. For me 9 out 10 times it will find my document, receipt, or even a sticky note very quickly and crop down to exactly the size of the paper you are scanning. Of course, if it doesn’t get the edges perfect, and it almost always will, you can adjust the edges after the scan completes.
Cloud Services
Scanbot out of the box connects to your iCloud drive or other cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and many more.Having this built into the app makes it so seamless and easy to upload your documents and jump over to a computer to see them synced and ready to go.
Fax
Now if you’re someone that still needs to send faxes Scanbot has got you covered. You can purchase fax credits directly from the app and send faxes from your phone! This can be handy especially when it comes to sending letters and information to some institutions that still are using fax machines **cough IRS**.
Workflows
Workflows allow you to automate a common task you may do like say send in all your receipts to your boss for processing or reimbursements, or even like in my budgeting resolution I can create workflows that will automatically upload my receipts into the appropriate folders by each credit card. Workflows can be super powerful and even I know I am not using them to their fullest potential so it’s definitely a feature that can be utilized greatly after you set them up.
Now the reason Scanbot is currently my go-to mobile scanning app is that it lets me dive down into my folders on iCloud natively. One of my new year’s resolutions was to stay on top of my budgeting and with Scanbot I can quickly scan all my receipts and dive down into the folders I’ve created in order to organize them quickly. I name my receipts with the date of the purchase following with the name of the place i.e.2.13.19 Best Buy. These scans then become available directly on my laptop.
Scanbot Pro
Scanbot is a free download with amazing features but if you want features like OCR(optical character recognition) or the fancy way of saying making your PDFs searchable, automatic upload of your documents to any cloud service, iCloud sync across devices, encrypting your PDFs plus more features you can grab the in-app purchase of Scanbot Pro.Currently priced at $6.99 in the App Store. The link below will be to the free version of the app do not get confused if you see one that has the $6.99 price tag that one just automatically gives you Scanbot Pro right from the start butI encourage you to try the free version to see if it’s the scanner app that will work for you!
Scanner Pro by Readdle
Readdle has a long history on the Apple App store with some fantastic apps from Spark Email to Documents 5 and Calendar 5. Come Scanner Pro to target those that wanted a scanner on their smartphone and one that integrates well with the rest of their apps. Now the first immediate downside to Scanner Pro is that it cost $3.99, cheaper than Scanbot but in order to test out the app you have to download their app called Scanner Mini by Readdle.
Nonetheless Scanner Pro by Readdle has the same fantastic features as Scanbot Pro including the ability to fax, at an additional cost with fax credits.
Here are those features that are also found in Scanbot Pro:
Fast Automatic Scanning
Text Recognition (OCR)
iCloud Syncing
Cloud Services integration
Workflows
Now my biggest gripe with Scanner Pro was the interface and how saving documents were handled. It personally did not fit my goal of getting my receipts organized and I ran into some bugs with iCloud syncing so I could not use it for my project but as a stand-alone scanning app, it's fantastic! And if you are a Readdle user you with enjoy the integration with their suite of apps. And sadly, for Android users, Scanner Pro is only available for iOS on the Apple App Store.
Office Lens
Now if you are an Office 365 user or afan of Microsoft products Office Lens may be the right scanner app for you. The best part about Office Lens is that is completely free to use! It does lack some features such as support for multiple cloud services, makes sense seeing we’re limited to OneDrive, faxing and having workflows but it does makeup for those features by having other offerings,
Whiteboard/Blackboard Capture
Office Lens has the ability to convert an image of whiteboards and blackboards and turn them into readable (and searchable) PDF’s! On top of that Office Lens takes it a step further and allows you to convert any scanned documents directly into Word and PowerPoint files and upload them to your OneDrive account. Office Lens says they can cleanup the images and remove the glare you typically would get when pointing camera at a whiteboard, (haven’t tested this out yet but let me know your experience if you have!).
Business Card Mode
In Business card mode Office Lens can automatically detect all the information on a business card and extract it to create a new contact for you, except it is using Microsoft OneNote for this feature and will add the image of the business card in your OneNote as well.
So, if you’re a heavy Microsoft Office user and use their own suite of apps including OneDrive this free scanner app is probably your best bet, Oh and it’s on every platform!
Adobe Scan
Now Adobe scan really does not compare to the other apps I’ve listed above but it was in the next best category for mobile scanners. It does not have rich features like Scanbot or Scanner Pro but if you’re in the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite it could be an app that fits into your workflow.
Like Office Lens, it has the ability to extract information from a business card and create a contact for you. It also has automatic text recognition of any document you scan but will upload your documents into the Adobe Cloud which comes a part of your Creative Cloud subscription. So yes, the app is free to download but will not work without an active Adobe Creative Cloud subscription ($39.99/month) or just the Adobe PDF Pack ($9.99/month).
If you are already a user of Adobe Creative Cloud you should check out this app because it’s included in your subscriptions. The use where I found it handy was when I was sketching a logo design on paper and wanted it quickly on my computer. Since I use Adobe CC and all of their apps on my computer by scanning my sketch it was quickly accessible to use in Adobe Illustrator. But once again this app is not as robust as the others and comes at a steeper cost. Adobe Scan is available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store!
Evernote Scannable
Now the reason I decided to include Evernote Scannable on the list is that in the past I was an Evernote user and after seeing the integration with their service it became really handy to use and have on my phone. But sadly, the project may have been abandoned because it hasn’t seen any major changes or updates in the last 7 months…
One thing that Scannable really does well was scanning business cards and allowing you to easily create new contacts to your phone but that’s about it.
The interface is very bland and not very friendly when compared to the competition above. But if you are still on the Evernote wagon and like using their service Scannable plays well with Evernote And allows to you to add those scans right into your notes. Other than that,there’s not much else Scannable offers, it doesn’t even have text recognition software. So, this one definitely ranks last on this list in terms of features but because it is free it’s easy for you to check it out and test out the scanning! Scannable is only available on the Apple App Store.
If you made it this far, I want to say thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this blog and learned something helpful out of it, please share it with friends and family who could get something out of it! If you have a favorite mobile scanning app let me know down in the comments.
Thanks for reading!
