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Jun 29, 2025

The 3 Best Mobile Scanning Apps of 2025 | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Matthew Guay After a new round of testing, we’ve added vFlat for books and two-page layouts, Photomyne for color photos, and Google Files as an option worth considering for some Android users. When

By Matthew Guay

After a new round of testing, we’ve added vFlat for books and two-page layouts, Photomyne for color photos, and Google Files as an option worth considering for some Android users.

When life gives you paper, your phone can turn it into clear PDF scans in 10 seconds flat.

Modern smartphones come equipped with a scanning tool, tucked away in Apple Notes on iPhones and Google Drive or Files on Android phones. These apps are honestly good enough for the occasional scan. Dedicated mobile scanning apps, however, offer faster, higher-quality scans, often for free.

After six years of testing, Adobe Scan remains our favorite mobile scanning app. It snaps clear scans in seconds, includes professional optical character recognition (OCR) and editing tools, and costs nothing to use most features. It’s the best choice if you regularly scan documents from your phone.

For faster, multi-page scans, vFlat scans open books into two individual, flat pages in seconds.

While a dedicated flatbed scanner is best for archival scans of photos, Photomyne can turn a page of pictures into individual scans for a streamlined way to back up your memories.

Free, fast, and full of features, Adobe Scan is the best app for scanning documents into clean PDFs.

This app lets you scan books into individual pages with fast snaps and automatic curve correction. But it does not sync scans to the cloud, and it has fewer editing and annotation tools.

Take a single scan of a page full of pictures or business cards to save each photo individually. This one lacks OCR, so it’s not a good choice for scanning pages of text.

The best scanning apps automatically recognize document edges and snap a clear scan — no taps or button presses required.

Additional modes scan books, multi-page spreads, business cards, and more, with features to split pages or save contact info.

When automatic crops or lighting needs adjustment, or scanned forms need to be filled out, annotation tools let you edit the scan.

Optical character recognition lets you search through and copy scanned text, tap on links or phone numbers, and edit documents.

Free, fast, and full of features, Adobe Scan is the best app for scanning documents into clean PDFs.

Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS) is fast and simple to use, with more professional scanning features than the competition. It’s great at capturing all kinds of common document types: receipts, tax documents, and the occasional business card. And it includes OCR, which makes your scans’ text searchable. It also has tools to bulk-edit scans and adjust for brightness and clarity, largely for free.

We were able to automatically scan, enhance, crop, and save a single document into a PDF file complete with OCR, with a single tap and in 10 seconds. Scans are automatically saved to Adobe Document Cloud and synced to Adobe Acrobat, for safekeeping and office work.

The core features are free, including unlimited scans, 2 GB of cloud storage, OCR on documents up to 25 pages, and basic editing features.

If you want to edit the text in scanned documents or import them into Office software, you might consider the $10-per-month upgrade to Adobe Scan Premium. This allows you to edit scanned text; export PDFs to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats; OCR text on up to 100-page documents; and store 20 GB of files in the cloud. These are useful features for scanning documents and then editing them in Office software. Yet for most mobile scanning needs, Adobe Scan’s free plan more than suffices.

This app lets you scan books into individual pages with fast snaps and automatic curve correction. But it does not sync scans to the cloud, and it has fewer editing and annotation tools.

For all types of scanning, vFlat (for Android and iOS) is impressively fast. But it excels especially at scanning books. Open a book and switch to vFlat’s two-page mode to snap, straighten, and save each page individually, while removing most of the distortion and page curve. We recommend this if you need to regularly scan book pages to reference later.

While it took Adobe 30 seconds, from start to save, to scan four documents, vFlat accomplished the same job in 17 seconds — with a slight loss in clarity and no OCR by default, but with sharper cropped edges.

vFlat does not sync scans to the cloud, nor does it include as many editing and annotation features as Adobe Scan. Its free plan is limited to 10 PDF exports with OCR and five two-page scans each month, and it costs $4 a month for unlimited exports. The free plan is worth considering if you need to occasionally quickly scan documents and especially two-page layouts; the paid plan is worth considering if you scan more than five pages from books per month.

Take a single scan of a page full of pictures or business cards to save each photo individually. This one lacks OCR, so it’s not a good choice for scanning pages of text.

Photomyne (for Android and iOS) is the only app we tested that consistently scanned photos that were close to their original color, since most mobile scanner apps are optimized to capture documents. It’s also the only app that captures multiple photos or business cards in a single shot.

Its document scanning is lackluster, without the OCR and annotation tools most mobile scanning apps offer. While you can use Photomyne for free to scan photos and save them to Google Photos, most features require its $20-per-month or $60-per-year paid plans. The free version is a good choice if you need to quickly scan photos and scrapbooks into your phone.

Wirecutter has been writing about scanning since 2013.

I’ve been testing and writing about software professionally since 2010. Over that time, I’ve tested a wide range of productivity software. I’ve used scanning apps, especially Apple Notes, on my iPhone to scan documents regularly for more than a decade.

For this guide:

To quickly scan business cards, receipts, ID cards, forms, and everyday paper in a pinch, everyone should use either the included scanning features on their phone or a dedicated, third-party mobile scanning app.

Every modern smartphone’s camera is perfectly capable of snapping clear scans of documents in seconds. Phone scans don’t have the color accuracy and clarity necessary for archival scans of important documents and photos, but they are clear enough for everyday documents. Thanks to technology advancements, mobile scanning apps now automatically crop and brighten scans and recognize text nearly as well as their desktop counterparts.

Traditional, standalone scanners are still useful, especially for:

“Scanning apps ... are great when you do not intend to make archival images but simply need quick and convenient copies,” said Joe Hoover, digital scanning technologist at the Minnesota Historical Society. Archival copies should be scanned at a minimum of 1200 ppi (pixels per inch), Hoover said. But phone scans capture at roughly 350 ppi; this is enough for quick scans, but it’s not enough to capture the finer details in photographs, historical handwritten manuscripts, and other cases where something as close to the original document as possible is needed.

For most quick scans, a scanning app on your phone is good enough. Even when you’re capturing pages of a book for research, Cornel University Library’s Archival Research guide advises that to “quickly acquire text documents for research at a later time, your scanner app is probably the easiest way.”

We agree. And that’s why we use mobile scanning apps for speed, even in an office with a desktop scanner nearby.

Many people use their phone’s camera to take a snapshot of a receipt or a business card. It’s convenient, and snapping photos with a phone has become second nature to many.

A photo is good enough for scanning receipts to include in expense reports or to quickly capture a restaurant menu or slides during a conference. But using your camera to capture a clear, paper-like copy of a print document takes additional editing: cropping to the document edges, adjusting brightness to approximate a clean scan, and removing any tilt or skew. Exporting the scan as a PDF with OCR text requires additional apps and steps.

Dedicated scanning apps take the tedium out of scanning. They recognize document edges and automatically crop to them, adjust for image skew, brighten documents to remove shadows and glare, recognize text automatically, and save all scanned pages together as a PDF. Instead of wasting time editing each photo, you can typically scan and share multiple pages in under a minute.

Since the best mobile scanning apps offer generous free plans, it’s worth the trouble of downloading an app and learning your way around it to quickly capture clear scans from your phone.

Since there’s a document-scanning tool bundled with your phone, mobile scanning apps must be exceptional to warrant a download. In our experience, most of them are anything but. The vast majority of mobile scanning apps offer basic scanning features, and they have intrusive ads and weekly subscriptions.

For this guide, we focused on the following key features that together add up to a professional, streamlined scanning experience:

Based on the criteria above, we used 21 mobile scanning apps, on either an iPhone 13 Pro or a Samsung Galaxy phone, in a variety of scenarios:

We rated each app’s ease of use, edge detection, clarity and scan quality, and scanning speed. We tried alternate shooting modes, where available, and we tested cropping tools, filters, and annotations. We also exported each scan as a PDF, checked OCR text for accuracy, and tested other export options when possible.

With the 16 top contenders in hand, we compared default scans from each app to compare for edge detection, color, and clarity.

Free, fast, and full of features, Adobe Scan is the best app for scanning documents into clean PDFs.

If you want to quickly scan documents and export them as PDFs, complete with OCR text, in under a minute, Adobe Scan (Android, iOS) is the mobile scanning app we recommend.

It consistently delivered higher-quality scans across a wide variety of document types and lighting environments. And its streamlined interface packs in a surprising variety of professional scanning and editing tools.

It’s fast and simple to use. Adobe Scan opens directly to the camera interface. Point your phone at a document, and Adobe Scan will detect the edges and then moments later show the scanned document on your screen. You can proceed to save the PDF or keep scanning to save multiple documents in a single PDF. Once finished, Adobe Scan will recognize text in your scans and save the completed file to the app automatically.

For most scans, Adobe Scan’s default settings are perfect. You can scan, save a PDF, and share a copy of your file in three to five taps on average.

Editing tools let you tweak individually or in bulk. Scans came out crisp, with sharp text, bright backgrounds, and generally clean edges and straight lines. You can always adjust the defaults if needed. The Crop tool lets you zoom out and see the whole picture, to expand the document edges; the Cleanup tool can remove fingers or smudges in the scan or replace the background color. The brightness, contrast, filter, and resize options let you apply changes individually or in bulk to all of your scanned pages.

Use shooting modes to capture text anywhere. Adobe Scan’s camera is optimized to scan documents by default, but it also includes modes for business and ID cards, whiteboards, and two-page book spreads. The card modes were less likely to cut off the edges of a scanned ID, while the book mode can scan two pages at a time and adjust decently for curvature.

There is no mode for scanning photos, and Adobe Scan’s default color delivered overly bright, over-saturated photos that alternate filters couldn’t quite rescue. Your camera app — or a dedicated photo scanning app, like Photomyne — will deliver higher image quality, while Adobe Scan is better at capturing documents and other print media.

Edit scanned documents with automatic OCR. Adobe Scan automatically recognizes typed text in 18 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese, and it saves the OCR text in exported PDFs on both free and paid plans. It did not recognize most handwriting (something vFlat can do), but it was nearly perfect at recognizing typed text, all the way down to 6-point fonts. It can also search through the text of all of your scanned documents to quickly find an old scan.

Adobe offers a paid upgrade version that lets you change or delete any text on a scanned page. It works impressively well on typed documents with common fonts like Times New Roman or Helvetica, and it saves any edits to the scanned PDF. The same paid feature can export scans as editable Microsoft Word documents.

Annotate scans in the app or with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Adobe Scan’s Edit options include a limited Markup tool to highlight and draw on your scanned documents in your choice of digital ink color. That’s enough to add a quick signature to a document.

For more detailed edits, the Fill & Sign button opens the free companion Adobe Acrobat Reader (Android, iOS) app. There you’ll find form-focused annotation tools, including an option to tap anywhere to add an X or a dot, and a signature feature via Acrobat Document Cloud, Adobe’s take on a DocuSign-style digital signing tool. We would have preferred more in-app annotation features, but the integration with Acrobat was seamless enough to still be useful.

Scans are automatically synced to Adobe Acrobat. It automatically syncs your scans to your Mac or PC, where you can share scanned PDFs and add basic annotations. You can also set Adobe Scan to save scanned documents as images in your phone’s camera roll. To save PDFs elsewhere — or to convert scans to Word, RTF, PowerPoint, Excel, or optimized PDF formats with a paid plan — use the share and export features to send files to third-party apps. Or you can share them with others, directly or with an Adobe Cloud link.

High-speed scanning makes short work of documents, but it requires a paid upgrade. Adobe Scan’s paid plan includes a high-speed scanning feature to rapidly scan documents. Tap the stack icon in the top of the scanning screen to scan and save documents as you pan your camera across your desk. In our tests, it snapped and saved four pages in 30 seconds, versus around 37 seconds with the standard auto-detect mode. The finished scans were as sharp and clear as they were with the standard mode.

Adobe Scan requires an account. You cannot scan documents or use any other app features without creating an Adobe account. You can use an existing Creative Cloud or Acrobat account, or sign up with a new free account in around three taps in the app.

You have to dismiss a preview before scanning additional pages. By default, Adobe Scan shows a preview of your scan, where you can adjust the automatic crop and color of the document before saving or scanning additional pages. You can disable this by using the high-speed shooting feature (with a Premium plan) or by turning off the “Let me adjust borders after each scan” option in settings.

The default Auto-color filter oversaturates colors at times. This was especially notable when we were scanning a form filled out with a blue ink pen, since the areas around the handwriting would often have a blue sheen. Switching to the original color or increasing contrast removed that effect.

OCR does not work with handwriting. Adobe Scan’s OCR on typed text is impressively good, and its editing features are nearly perfect with common fonts. But it fails entirely with handwriting. “Dear team” turned into “Oec.r {e_C<M),” when both Microsoft Word and Google Docs — along with the Google Cloud–powered OCR in vFlat — recognized the same handwriting correctly.

Adobe Scan Premium is expensive. At $10 per month, Adobe Scan’s Premium plan is priced similarly to professional desktop software, and it’s more expensive than most mobile scanning apps. Its free features are generous enough — including OCR on PDFs of up to 25 pages each — that it’s still worth downloading, even if you never upgrade. The paid plan also comes bundled with both Adobe Acrobat Pro (starting at $20 per month) and Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps (from $60 per month); this is a nice bonus if you use other Adobe software.

This app lets you scan books into individual pages with fast snaps and automatic curve correction. But it does not sync scans to the cloud, and it has fewer editing and annotation tools.

Most mobile scanning apps we tested could scan and save four pages in around 30 seconds. vFlat accomplished the same task in 17 seconds, about half the time. vFlat opens to the camera and recognizes page edges nearly instantly. And it snaps clear scans with little distortion, living up to the flat in its name. That makes vFlat the best scanning app for frequently scanning pages of books.

vFlat’s 2 Pages mode can snap an open book and save each page individually, with less curve or other distortion than any other app we tested.

Scans in just seconds. Whereas other apps take a moment to recognize document edges and sharpen the finished scan, vFlat feels as fast at snapping a scan as a phone’s default Camera app is at taking a photo. Its completed scans are incredibly clear, whether you’re shooting a single page or a two-page book spread, in nearly any lighting.

Can capture multiple pages at once. The 2 Pages mode is best for scanning books, with finished scans that look nearly as flat as a looseleaf page. But the same mode works well for capturing two documents simultaneously. It saves each as a separate file — a feature Adobe Scan and a few other apps also include — yet vFast does a far better job of making each page appear flat.

Automatically brighten, straighten, and remove fingers — or not. Most mobile scanner apps make all of the decisions for you via default settings. vFlat’s defaults are very good; you’ll get clear, flat scans with distortion and stray fingers removed — without tweaking anything. But from the settings, you can disable color enhancement, text darkening, and auto-finger removal, as well as set your scan quality (high by default) and timer (to steady your phone between pressing the shutter and capturing the scan).

Choose which camera to use. Most apps scan using your phone’s default camera; it tends to have the highest resolution for the clearest scans. vFlat uniquely includes an option to choose which camera to use for scans. Set it to use the wide lens to scan two-page spreads or the zoom lens to scan whiteboards.

Its free limits reset each month. The free app offers unlimited one-page scans and image saves, but it includes 10 PDF exports with OCR and five two-page scans each month for free. That’s enough for occasional scans — especially since you’ll get new export and OCR credits each month. And due to its lack of ads, even the free version is a nice scanning experience.

OCR is not automated. vFlat does not automatically recognize text in scans, but it does show a Recognize Text button on every scanned page. Tap that, and vFlat will send your scan to Google Cloud to recognize text. The subsequent OCR text is highly accurate for both typed and handwritten text, similar to the OCR in Google Docs, and it is included in the PDF when you export the scan. It’s just not as seamless as the automated OCR in Adobe Scan.

Scans are saved as individual pages. One thing that makes vFlat fast is that each page is saved directly to the app, no preview required. To export a PDF with multiple pages, you’ll need to go to the app’s library, select the required pages, and then export the completed file.

It has relatively few annotation features. You can crop the scan more than the default, but you cannot see the full, original photo to expand the scanned area. vFlat also includes a single annotation feature: Signature. Any other adjustments require exporting your scanned documents to another app.

Scans aren’t synced. In a similar vein, vFlat doesn’t include any cloud-syncing options. You can choose to have scans saved to your phone’s photo library, where they could be backed up to iCloud or Google Photos. PDFs require compiling and then exporting the files to your cloud-storage service of choice.

Take a single scan of a page full of pictures or business cards to save each photo individually. This one lacks OCR, so it’s not a good choice for scanning pages of text.

Need to scan photos to your phone? Photomyne is the only app we tested that can scan multiple photos or business cards in a single snap and then crop and save each photo individually. It’s also the only mobile scanning app that saves nearly natural-looking photos, without glare, oversaturation, or washed-out brightness.

You’ll still get the highest-quality photo scans from a dedicated flatbed scanner, but Photomyne is your next best option for a quick, clear backup of your printed photos.

It’s built for photos. Instead of brightening the shot for a clean white background, as most mobile scanning apps do, Photomyne opts for the most neutral brightness and color saturation. It includes modes to scan photos, negatives, slides, scrapbooks, and artwork. Instead of automatically shooting, Photomyne has you press and hold the shutter button for three seconds to capture a clear shot of your photos.

Scan individual pictures or a whole photo album. After shooting, Photomyne automatically straightens, crops, and sharpens photos before saving them to your library. Scan a photo album page with the default Photos mode to recognize and save each picture on the page individually, or use the Scrapbook mode to snap the entire page as a single image. Photomyne saves the original photo alongside the cropped scan. Using its crop tool, you can zoom out from the auto-cropped scan to include notes or other details surrounding the picture that otherwise get automatically cropped out.

You can save additional details about a photo. Photomyne includes a “What’s the story of this photo?” prompt under each image, and it recognizes faces, so you can put a name to the person. You can also add a date and location, or use a built-in Google Gemini integration to recognize outdoor locations and approximate when the photo was taken. There’s also an option to snap the back of a photograph (to preserve handwritten notes and processing details) or to record a voice caption (to preserve a loved one’s story about a photo).

Enhance and colorize photos with filters. The default image straightening and sharpening filters do a surprisingly good job of making scanned photos look like their original print copy, especially for older photos shot on film. Additional filters let you restore and enhance photos or make them cooler or warmer. Photomyne can also colorize black-and-white photos for free.

Most features require a paid account. You can use Photomyne for free to scan photos, business cards, and whole photo album pages in bulk. Photomyne will regularly remind you to upgrade; tap the “Ads are ok” button to bypass the screen. If you want to scan a large number of photos, we recommend upgrading to a paid plan for a month and then downgrading if you no longer need to regularly scan pictures.

Free exports are limited to Google Photos. Saving photos to your phone’s photo library, emailing photos, or sharing them in other apps all require a paid Photomyne account. Even with a paid account, Photomyne has no options to sync photos to another app automatically. It does, however, include a free Google Photos integration. Tap Share in an album, select the photos you want, then choose Save to Google Photos to export your scans for free.

It’s not great for scanning documents. The very features that make Photomyne better at scanning photos — more accurate colors, less brightness enhancement, and a focus on image export options without any PDF or annotation tools — make it a worse option for scanning documents. Keep Photomyne around for when you need to digitize photos, and use Adobe Scan or another mobile scanner app for scanning documents.

Its image quality is still limited compared with that of dedicated scanners. An individual picture cropped from a six-image photo album was only 1.5 megapixels — hardly archival quality, but still surprisingly clear considering the size. A dedicated scanner, or scanning photos individually on your phone, will give higher-quality scans. But if you want to quickly digitize a photo album while visiting relatives for the holidays, Photomyne’s convenience and speed are hard to beat.

If you have an iPhone or iPad: Apple Notes includes a quick scanner feature to automatically snap pages, save them as a PDF file in a new note, and annotate scans with on-screen marker and signature tools. There are two ways to jump into the scanner mode. Press the paperclip icon in a note, and then tap Scan Documents. Or press and hold the Apple Notes icon on your home screen, and then tap Scan Documents to jump straight into the camera.

All iPhones launched since 2018 — beginning with the iPhone XS — that run iOS 15 or later can recognize text in images and PDFs, scanned documents included. Apple Notes uses that feature to search through recognized text and uses it to name your note. It also has a unique scanning mode — Scan Text — to directly copy text from a document without saving the full scan. Apple Notes does not, however, save recognized text to exported PDF files, nor does it include other filters or shooting modes.

If you use an Android device: Google Drive and Files by Google are often preinstalled on Android devices and are free to download. Both include a scanner button right above the + button to add files, with identical scanning features. It automatically recognizes the edges of documents; includes basic filters, cleanup, and editing tools; and saves multipage scans to a single PDF.

Google Drive automatically uploads scanned documents to your Google Drive account, while Files by Google saves scanned documents locally to your phone. Neither app includes OCR, but you can open scanned PDFs from any app in Google Docs to recognize text — including highly accurate handwriting recognition. Google Drive is also available on iOS, with more basic scanning features.

Mobile scanning apps make scanning documents a cinch. Point your phone in the general direction of a document to capture a reasonably good scan, with brightness and distortion corrected automatically.

A bit of additional effort lets phone scans rival a quick desktop scanner’s output. “I drape a black cloth over my table, then mount my smartphone on a tripod,” tech reporter Rich DeMuro writes, describing his mobile scanning setup. Zero Health CMO Stanley Schwartz seconded the opinion: “If you scan on a black background, you’ll get best results.” While this tends to be true, we found that you often don’t have to go to that much trouble to get decent-quality scans.

Here are our tips from years of mobile scanning:

Experiment a bit to find the ideal setup for your document type. Photos and glossy business cards tend to show glare, so scan farther away from direct light sources. Edge detection is often overly sensitive on ID cards and book-shaped objects like passports, so edit the default crop, or use ID-specific modes to capture the full edges of your document. Unusual document shapes, including sticky notes or brochures, may similarly require tweaking crop and color settings to snap an accurate scan.

This is not a comprehensive list of all the scanning apps we’ve tested. We have removed ones that are discontinued or no longer meet our criteria.

Microsoft Lens (Android, iOS), a former pick, is free, snaps clear scans automatically with good edge detection, and does not require an account. It doesn’t include OCR, but it can export documents to Microsoft Word for decent text recognition and editing. It’s somewhat slower at scanning documents than the competition, and it shoots darker, less-clear scans. It also requires more taps to save and share PDF files after scanning.

SwiftScan (Android, iOS), a former upgrade pick, can upload scans to more than a dozen cloud services (or your own FTP server) with a $60-per-year subscription. It had more trouble detecting document edges than other apps. Also, the free version shoots only two pages per scan and shows ads even in the shooting screen.

ABBYY FineReader (called Capture Documents on Android and FineReader on iOS) can scan three multipage documents for free, and then it costs $6 per month or $21 per year for unlimited scanning, OCR, and cloud sync. It offers a less-accurate, on-device OCR or a higher-quality cloud OCR, which took around 3 minutes for a four-page scan. It doesn’t offer scanning modes, but it is fast and accurate at detecting the edges of documents.

Scan.Plus (Android, iOS) was slower at scanning documents, and the finished images were not as sharp as those from the competition. It’s free, supported with in-app links to paid signature and fax apps from the same developers. It also has a number of AI tools, including a reasonably accurate tool to remove fingers from scans and an “AI Image to Text” button to recognize text on-device without saving the OCR text to the PDF.

CamScanner (Android, iOS) has had a troubled history involving Chinese malware. Its interface is overly busy, with ads for other apps from the CamScanner team, plus several scanning modes that seem to be of limited usefulness (stuff like question sets, an ID photo maker, and QR codes).

Clear Scan (Android, iOS) has a less-polished user interface than our picks. It displays constant ads, and while it can auto-shoot scans, you have to approve every shot, and it feels slower than other apps.

Dropbox (Android, iOS) includes a built-in scanner feature to scan PDFs to your Dropbox account for free. It scans black-and-white images by default; you have to switch to Original or Whiteboard filters after shooting to restore color. It was the slowest scanning app we tested, and it doesn’t include OCR or annotation features.

Evernote Scannable is free, has a simple design, and produces good-looking scans incredibly fast — as fast as Adobe Scan’s high-speed scanning mode. It has some odd limitations: It’s iOS only, less accurate at capturing smaller documents like business cards, doesn’t include OCR, and stores scans on your device for only 30 days before they’re automatically deleted.

Genius Scan (Android, iOS) is simple and free, but it isn’t as polished as our picks. It doesn’t automatically open to the camera, and the UI doesn’t rotate when shooting in landscape orientation. It does not do OCR scans by default, so you have to press a separate button to recognize text per page. Search within OCR results was hit or miss. OCR, sync, cloud storage, and more require a $40-per-year subscription.

iScanner (Android, iOS) was among the slowest scanner apps we tested, requiring more taps than any other app to scan and save documents. It also shows frequent, difficult-to-dismiss pop-over ads, and it costs $5 per week or $21 per year for paid plans.

Mobile Scanner (Android, iOS) repeatedly pushes its $4-per-week or $40-per-year subscription, or its $100 lifetime purchase, throughout the app, making it difficult to use the app’s free scanning features. The free app can only scan single documents at a time, and exported PDFs are watermarked. Its scans were also less sharp than those of the competition.

Notebloc (Android, iOS) is a free, ad-supported scanner app (with a $1-per-month subscription or a $24 one-time fee to remove ads) targeting students and teachers. It’s more bare-bones than most other apps, it does not automatically detect documents when shooting, and it’s worse at automatically cropping and OCR than other apps. It also centers the scan on a standard, letter-sized document instead of exporting the scanned document’s original dimensions.

Open Scanner (iOS only) is a free, open-source scanning app built around privacy. It includes the same iOS annotation features as Apple Notes. It recognizes scanned text in the app, but it does not include the OCR text in exported PDFs. It also overexposed documents in bright environments.

We previously tested and dismissed two other iOS-only apps. Prizmo pauses a moment while scanning each page, yet it delivers clear scans with good edge detection — but it’s worse at scanning books and skewed documents. Its OCR was good, including at recognizing handwriting, though you have to manually run OCR on each scan. Scanner Pro offered the most scanning modes, including presets for receipts, invoices, forms, letters, IDs, business cards, sheet music, and more. It can send faxes, for $1 each, and it can generate automated expense reports from receipts with the $30-per-year paid plan. PDF exports are watermarked with the free plan.

Scan Hero (Android, iOS) offers poor edge detection in scans, and when you first open the app, it guides you into an $8-per-week trial, which would be far more expensive than for any other scanning app.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.

Stanley Schwartz and Brandon Alexander, Zero Health CMO, and Information Security/Risk Management at The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, LinkedIn survey, April 16, 2025

Rick DeMuro, KTLA-TV tech reporter, Here's how I scan papers and artwork, April 2, 2022

Cornel University Library, , Tools & Techniques for Archival Research, May 2, 2025

Joe Hoover, Minnesota Historical Society digital technology specialist, American Association of Museums forum post, October 7, 2022

Robert Irish, , Medium post, November 26, 2022

Matthew Guay

Matthew Guay is a writer focused on software and productivity. Previously he was a writer for the automation platform Zapier and a founding editor of the software community Capiche. With more than 1,500 logins in his password manager, he has lost track of how much software he has tested.

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