What function of a scanner would you use if you want to convert a letter that someone has mailed to you into a computer editable document?

A scanning app with optical character recognition (OCR) is indispensable for getting organized. The best scanning apps help you capture all kinds of information such as paper tax documents, whiteboard notes, business cards, and proof of vaccination forms. They come in handy in other ways, too—for everything from digitizing receipts to collecting recipes.

A few years ago, I had to pick up a new passport and on the same day drop it off for a visa. Right after I picked up the passport, I thought, "I should probably have a copy of this before I hand it over." So I took out my phone and scanned it. Sure enough, the visa took more than two weeks, and in the meantime, I needed the details of my passport for a bunch of other paperwork. Good thing I had a legible copy!

How Do Scanning Apps Work?

When you use a mobile scanning app, it's not much different from taking a picture. 

In an ideal setting, you lay your document flat on a contrasting background and point your phone's camera at it. Next, the scanning app guides you through the process, usually telling you to line up the edges of the document with crop marks on the phone screen and hold still. Don't worry if you don't have steady hands. A good scanning app adjusts for slight movements. The scan takes a second or two. When it's done, you generally see a preview of your document. The app usually finishes by asking whether you want to add more pages or start a new scan.

Why Not Just Take a Picture?

Perhaps you're thinking that you could skip a scanning app altogether and instead take a photo of any papers that you want to save digitally. You could, but there are two disadvantages. 

First, an image is unlikely to be as clear as a scan, so you run the risk of not having legible text. Second, you can't search the text, which could make it extremely difficult to find what you need later, much less edit it. For searching and editing, you need an app that includes optical character recognition (OCR). All the apps included below have it.

What Should You Scan With a Scanning App?

Let's look at examples of how you can use a scanning app to stay organized. After that, I'll explain which features you should look for in the best scanning apps and name a few apps that have them.

Tax Documents

If you receive paper tax documents and you file using tax prep software or work with a remote tax professional, then you must turn those papers into PDFs. It takes seconds to do and saves you the time of transcribing all those numbers into an online form.

Business Cards

The next time someone hands you a business card, use a scanning app to capture that person's contact information and then return the card. You'll show how easy it is to be paperless while also collecting their details in a digital format, so you don't have to type anything later. Some scanning apps can detect business cards and create a new entry in your contact app. Others search LinkedIn to suggest connecting there.

Whiteboards and Presentations

In meetings, most of us want to give each speaker our full attention. That's hard to do if we're squinting at a presentation or whiteboard, hoping not to miss an important detail. A great solution is to quickly pull out your phone and scan a whiteboard or presentation slides as they appear knowing that you can look over them in more detail later.

Documents to Email or Back Up

While many people and organizations are happy to send you digital documents, there are still plenty of instances when we encounter paper. Let's say someone gives you an important piece of paper to sign, but you want your lawyer to check it over first. That's a great time to use your scanning app. Scan the pages and immediately send them to your lawyer by email, sometimes right from the scanning app. Some apps also let you digitally sign documents.

Other important papers that you might scan and back up include immunization records, including a COVID-19 vaccination card, titles to vehicles and property, and legal certificates (birth, marriage, immigration, etc.). 

Bonus Tip: Physical COVID-19 cards fit neatly into clear, plastic, 4-by-3-inches conference badge holders. They sell in multipacks for a couple of bucks online or at office supply stores. They do a decent job of protecting the original card, though you should still make a digital backup.

What to Look for in a Scanning App

The best scanning apps capture your documents clearly, make the text searchable, and help you save the finished files in the right places. Here's what to look for:

Automatic Edge Detection

A great scanning and OCR app automatically finds the edges of your documents automatically. When you point the camera at the paper, the crop marks you see on screen should search for the edge of the document on their own and adjust to different dimensions. So, whether you're scanning an A4 sheet of paper or a business card, the app figures it out automatically.

Save and Export Options

The best scanning apps give you options for where you can save or export your newly scanned texts, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or another storage service. You don't want an app that forces you to keep documents in a new place.

OCR for Editing and Search

I mentioned OCR at the top of this article. When you have OCR, any words you scan become text. That means you can copy and paste or edit it. In other words, you can scan a paper document, make it a digital document, and fix typos or otherwise make changes. With the best mobile scanning apps, you can save scanned files as word processing documents.

When you run OCR on a file, it also enables you to search the text of those files. This means if you want to find a particular tax document, you could try searching for "1099" or another keyword. If the word is on the scanned page, the app will find it. When you merely have photos of documents, you can't search their text. You can only search their file names and any metadata you may have added.

Multipage Support

Really good scanning apps offer to scan multiple pages consecutively and compile them into one final product. The most high-end scanning apps also correct for page distortion, such as when you scan pages from a book and can't quite get it to lay flat.

How Much Do Mobile Scanning Apps With OCR Cost?

Most of the best scanning and OCR apps have a free level of service and a premium paid level. OCR is often considered a premium feature. For a few years, you could pay about $4–$7 for a decent app, but now the one-time prices are as much as ten times higher!

Thankfully, most apps have switched to subscription models instead, and the prices are easier to swallow. The only problem is some people only need a scanning app a few times a year and don't want to pay all year long for something they're not using. Too many people already have a hard time tracking their online subscriptions. If you can make do with the free version, that's your best bet. If not, sign up for a month-to-month subscription, cancel when you're done with your scanning projects, and resume the membership the next time you need it. It's really quite easy and clear to do as long as you sign up through the App Store or Google Play.

The Best Scanning Apps

Now that you understand what scanning apps can do and why you might want one, here are some of the best you can find. I've focused on apps that offer scanning and OCR to make your text editable. I've also stuck with apps from major companies with good privacy policies, so you have more assurance that all the information you scan is kept safe.

See It (Opens in a new window)

Free; $5.99 per month or $20.99 per year for Premium

Abbyy is a leader in scanning and OCR. Its mobile scanning app—which has gone by a variety of names in the past but is now FineReader PDF—has automatic document-boundary detection, annotation tools for signing documents and redacting sensitive information, among other features. It's exceptional for multilanguage support. You can set the interface to the language of your choice (11 options for iOS and 5 for Android), and the OCR can detect 193 languages from documents that you want to scan and output to Microsoft Word. 

If you need to scan books, the app has a feature that lets you scan two pages of an open book at once, with the result preserving the two pages as separate. You need a Premium subscription for the best features. If you're a heavy scanner, you might also consider Abbyy's scanning app that's still sold for a one-time fee: FineReader Pro ($59.99).

Available on Android, iOS

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Free; $9.99 per month for Premium

When you open Adobe Scan(Opens in a new window) to digitize documents, the scanning screen offers you options for the type of scan you're taking: whiteboard, form, document, or business card. You can also upload images from your photo collection to turn them into PDFs. The app has a cleanup tool that I love because it lets you quickly remove any stray marks or discolorations.

You need a Premium account to export files, including converting PDFs to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. A Premium account also lets you combine multiple scans into one PDF, compress PDFs to a smaller size, password-protect the app, and increase the OCR limit to run text recognition on up to 100 pages. For the $9.99-per-month fee, you also get 20GB of storage space for your scans on Document Cloud, plus premium features in the Acrobat Reader mobile app, too.

Available on Android, iOS

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Free

Microsoft Office Lens is one of very few scanning apps that's completely free. It's slightly slower and clunkier than other apps, but it gets the job done. The app has special modes for scanning whiteboards, documents, business cards, and photos. When you scan something, your phone's camera flash will go off automatically if it's needed, although you can bypass that setting if you prefer. The app also lets you import images from your phone's photo collections.

After you capture a file, you can adjust the borders of the image, or continue scanning to make a multipage document. Microsoft Lens has annotation tools and filters, too, for making documents black and white, for example. To be able to edit the text you scan, you must select the Word option when saving, export the text via Microsoft OneDrive, and then open the document in Word.

Available on Android, iOS, Windows