Document scanning was mainly fulfilled by dedicated Scanners until a few years ago, however, in the last couple of years we’ve seen a rise of document scanning applications that reduce the effort in scanning and digitizing physical documents. Applications like Adobe Scan and CamScanner use the in-built camera in the smartphone to capture pictures of the document, crop the images to the correct dimensions and apply the appropriate filter to make the document more readable.
There are a plethora of options when it comes to document scanning applications, notable ones among them include Adobe Scan, Office Lens by Microsoft, Scanbot, and others.
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Adobe Scan
Adobe Scan is a great option for capturing and sorting documents, it is a dedicated scanning application from Adobe, the creators of PDF file format. When it comes to the Adobe Scan application, our expectations were pretty high, and the application pretty much lives up to our expectations. Adobe Scan runs on your Smartphone as a dedicated application and uses the camera to capture an image of the document and then convert it into a PDF file, there is a preview option to optimize the file dimensions, crop, rotate and edit the color as required. The best part about the Adobe Scan is its close integration with other Adobe applications allowing you to scan a PDF document, annotate, edit, sign and work collaboratively with the scanned documents. The Adobe Scan is a free application to download and use and comes with most features that people use
Pricing: Free
Download Adobe Scan from Play Store
Download Adobe Scan from Apple App Store
Microsoft Office Lens
If you enjoy the Adobe Scan functionality and simplicity but work more with the Microsoft Office Suite, then the Microsoft Office Lens for Android and iOS might be a better option for you. The application is interactive and has very simple functionality, it also comes with the option to generate output in Word and PowerPoint formats in addition to PDF format. The scan option is really good but still struggles to keep up with the quality of Adobe Scan, the sharing options are a little limited too. However, if you use the Office Suite often then the Microsoft Office Lens will be a very handy tool to scan the documents easily. The OCR or text recognition feature in the Microsoft Office Lens also makes up for any drawbacks that the application has to offer.
Pricing: Free
Download Microsoft Office Lens from Google Play Store
Download Microsoft Office Lens from the Apple App Store
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Scanbot
Scanbot is a fully-featured Document Scanning application and comes with more features than Adobe Scan or Microsoft Office lens. There are custom folder for organizing the documents better, smart file naming, cloud sync, and automatic uploads. Scanbot also produces very good quality scans across different document types including business cards, photos, and books. The application supports OCR in 60 languages and the results are pretty good as well. The Scanbot app also comes with five color modes to choose from to ensure that the scanned document looks perfect, the built-in tools automatically crop and optimize the documents. The scanned documents can be saved in JPG and PDF formats and uploaded automatically to all major cloud providers. There is also a fax option to send the scanned documents directly to a fax number with support for over 50 countries. If you are not completely satisfied with the basic features being offered on Adobe Scan or Microsoft Office lens then checkout the Scanbot for more advanced features.
Pricing: Free or Rs 470/Rs 950/Rs 1400
Download Scanbot from Google Play Store
Download Scanbot from Apple App Store
CamScanner
CamScanner turns the simple camera on the mobile device into a document scanner and was one of the first document scanning applications to make it big. CamScanner allows you to scan a large variety of documents including invoices and receipts. These scanned documents can be converted to PDF files and can be automatically uploaded to cloud services including Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Box. This application is targeted more towards business users and also allows you to invite your colleagues to view and comment on scanned documents. Few advanced editing features allow you to add annotations and watermarks to the documents to make them look more professional as well as to improve the security of the documents with an added passcode. The application comes in free variant but watermarks all the scanned documents, upgrading to the premium version removes the watermarks and gives several other additional features including 10 of Cloud Storage, password protection for documents and fax features.
Pricing: Free or Ra. 499/month
Download CamScanner from Google Play Store
Download CamScanner from Apple App Store
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Genius Scan
Genius Scan is a popular scanning application with claims of having digitized over half a billion documents. The application easily converts paper-based documents to JPG or PDF. The smart page detection feature easily detects the correct dimensions, perspective correction and applies image enhancement to the scanned documents. The batch scanning feature allows you to scan multiple pages of a physical document in minutes and convert them to a digital document. The application also enhances the legibility of the document and ensures they are readable so you can keep your files organized with titles and tags. There is also an option to upload the scanned documents to most cloud services including Dropbox, Google Drive, OneNote, Evernote, and even FTP. The application also allows you to protect sensitive documents with a password. The application is available for free download and comes with premium options if you want more features.
Pricing: Free / Rs 370
Download Genius Scan from Google Play Store
Download Genius Scan from Apple App Store
Update:
ScanPro
Made available on both Android and iOS, best mobile scanner app for documents and QR codes that puts your privacy first. It offers stuff like premium quality PDFs or JPGs, allows sending your documents as a fax right, smart file naming, scanning QR codes, enables automatic edge detection, scanning single and multiple-page documents, applies color, grayscale or black and white filters with automatic optimization and also enables one-tap email and print workflows. It is supported by cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and many more.
Scanbot
This is an app which is quite simple and quick to work with. It supports iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon Drive, Slack, Todolist, OneDrive, OneNote and Box. With this scanner, you can scan all kinds of documents like the standard paper documents, business cards, receipts, notes, whiteboards or even newspaper articles. Additionally, it detects document’s edges, crops and enhances the images and saves the result as PDF documents. You may download it on both Android and iOS with the alternative of in-app purchases being made available.
