Best Scanner Apps

iScanner is a polished and fully-featured scanner app that adds a wealth of valuable tools to your mobile device. A clutter-free interface makes all the tools you need to scan, sign, highlight, annotate, extract text, solve math problems, and measure area just a click away.

iScanner turns your mobile device into a portable scanner for capturing documents, notes, texts and more. Once your camera has grabbed the image, the app has features for making the information in those documents more accessible and useful.

iScanner is a popular app for students and educators because its AI-powered features automatically detect and adjust document borders, straighten scan pages, remove curves and skews, deblur images, and remove fingers from scans. It also recognizes handwritten text in 24+ languages.

iScanner is available for both iOS and Android devices for free.  

Price: Free

Platforms: Android, iOS

Adobe Scan is an intuitive, free scanner app from the makers of Adobe Acrobat. Scanner apps aren’t what first comes to mind when you think of Adobe. However, the company has managed to produce an excellent, free scanner app for Android and iOS.

My favorite feature part of Adobe Scan is how easy and intuitive it is to use. The app offers presets for scanning whiteboards, business cards, documents, and forms.

Once you select the type of material you want to scan, the app will automatically detect borders and keep the image in focus. All you have to do is hold your phone steady. If you prefer, you can also capture scans manually using controls very similar to your phone’s camera app.

After scanning, you can adjust the cropping, color, contrast, and other visual aspects. From there, you can export the scan as either a PDF or JPEG. Documents are saved to your Adobe Cloud account by default, but you also have the option to store your scans in Google Drive or save them locally on your phone.

The only downside of Adobe Scan is its lack of built-in document signing and annotation features. Given that Adobe wants you to use the app in tandem with Acrobat, however, this makes sense.

Price: Free

Platforms: Android, iOS

CamScanner will turn your device into a powerful portable scanner that recognizes text automatically (OCR) and help you become more productive in your work and daily life. Download this scanner app for free to instantly scan, save, and share any document in PDF, JPG, Word, or TXT formats. This tiny yet powerful free scanner app is a must-have for students and anyone involved in a small business: accountants, realtors, managers, or lawyers. Scan anything you need, including receipts, contracts, paper notes, fax papers, books, and store your scans as multipage PDF or JPG files 

Price: Basic features are available for free (with ads)

Platforms: iOS, Android

Capable on its own, Microsoft’s scanner app is especially useful for Office 365 users. As one of the industry leaders in document creation and editing software, it’s no surprise that Microsoft offers a scanner app.

Like Adobe Scan, Microsoft Lens offers several presets to make the scanning process fast and easy. Once you’ve scanned an image, Lens lets you edit its cropping, contrast, colors, and other visual aspects.

From there, you have the option to save your scan locally as either a JPEG or PDF. And if you’re an Office 365 subscriber, you can also export your scan to OneNote, OneDrive, and PowerPoint. You even have the option to automatically extract the scan’s text into Word using OCR.

While powerful, these features will only be useful if you already use Microsoft 365 apps for work or school. Lens is certainly a capable scanner app on its own, but you may want to consider one of the other options on this list if you don’t plan to use it in tandem with other Microsoft apps.

Price: Free, but works best with Microsoft 365 (which requires a separate, paid subscription).

Platforms: Android, iOS, Windows

Genius Scan is a simple scanner app with advanced export options. Genius Scan is a fairly simple app on the surface, and that’s a good thing. There’s very little friction to scan something: just point your camera at it, line up the edges, and press the camera button. From there, you can start editing the scan or continue scanning if your document has multiple pages.

After you’ve scanned something, Genius Scan shows its true power. It offers PDF and JPEG exports to all the standard apps: Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. But in addition, you can export your scan using WebDAV and FTP, options we haven’t seen in the other scanner apps we examined.

Plus, Genius Scan lets you print your document to a WiFi-connected printer or even fax it using the separate Genius Fax app. This is a huge boon since most homes (and many modern offices) lack fax machines.

Price: Free for unlimited scans. $7.99 to unlock OCR, cloud export, and PDF encryption.

Platforms: Android, iOS

Tiny Scanner is a free document scanning app that can quickly capture your receipts, documents, or anything else you need to scan as either an image or a PDF. The app can save the scanned files in the folders to keep yourself organized and then share your scans in just a few taps. You can quickly toggle between photograph, black and white, or greyscale.

Price: Free with in-app purchases

Platforms: Android, iOS

Another scanner app for your device is the SwiftScan app which can be considered as an alternative to the Office lens and Adobe scan app. This app has gained immense popularity among users with many downloads on the Google play store and Apple app store due to its multiple attractive features. Along with scanning your documents, the app also features a function that allows you to scan QR codes and Barcodes.

It comes with an OCR text recognition, and it also supports cloud storage that allows you to store the scanned documents on Google Drive, OneDrive and other cloud storage apps. You also get an auto-upload option with this application. With excellent document recognition and unique features, the SwiftScan app is considered one of the best scanner apps for Android and iPhone.

Price: Free with in-app purchases

Platforms: Android, iOS

If you are looking for the best PDF scanner app, then this Clear Scanner is the one to consider. It quickly scans your documents and other files on your phone and allows you to convert your scanned documents to PDF or JPEG format. The fast functioning of this app makes it one of the best scanner apps to use on your Android and iOS device. The app works well with cloud print, and you can easily print your scanned documents.

It gives you many professional features which can be used for editing scanned files. The app supports Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive so that you can easily save the documents in cloud storage for easy access in the future. You can save multiple pages within a single document and convert them into a single PDF file. The app is easy to download and free with a high amount of ratings as well as good reviews on both the Apple store and Google play store.

Price: Free with in-app purchases

Platforms: Android, iOS

ScanGuru app is one of the most efficient and carefully designed scanner apps for iPhone users. The pdf scanner iPhone integrates well with the device and offers a seamless document scanning experience with many other additional features which makes this scanning app one of the best on the App Store.

ScanGuru is a fast pdf scanner app which allows scanned copies to be saved as JPEG as well. It’s scanning capabilities are the best in the industry, creating sharp and clear scan results.

ScanGuru can be used to save business documents, IDs, business cards, notes, book pages, bills and anything else you would want to change in text form and save in your device. 

Price: Free with in-app purchases

Platforms: Android, iOS

Mobile Scanner is an app from which you can scan high-quality PDF documents with your own device without any complications. If you need to scan notes, books, images or even receipts, this tool will allow you to turn photos into PDFs in a matter of seconds.

Other interesting features of Mobile Scanner include the ability to perform group scans, as well as to export several documents at the same time. However, it also stands out for the intelligent image optimization, which detects edges and offers the possibility to automatically crop them; the OCR function, capable of recognizing characters or any text in your scans; or the sharing option, to share your scanners through the platform.

Price: Free with in-app purchases

Platforms: Android, iOS