Life, however, rarely gives us pristine documents. Fading, folding, tearing, book bindings, variations in ink saturation, and other factors can trip up OCR. With any scanning app, you'll get the best results when working with flat, single-sided, standard size pages of crisp black text in a single typeface (sans serif, ideally) arranged in paragraphs on white paper. Note that I didn't pick documents that would be easy. After narrowing it down based on the criteria above, I did in-depth testing on all the top contenders. I looked through the top-rated apps to come up with a giant list of tools to consider. Having said that, it's worth taking a look through your existing tech stack to see if any of your current apps already have this technology (many do). One other thing: I didn't want bloated apps-if you just want to scan, you don't need a CRM to do it. Having different scanning mode options can help with this kind of variety.

You're likely going to be scanning a variety of documents-from IDs and passports to books and receipts. If your goal is to add more text, a signature, or watermarks, or to password-protect your documents, having customization options is also important. Scanning and digitizing a document may just be the beginning for you. A phone scan app doesn't need to have lots of bells and whistles, but I did take into account how effective each app was at organizing, saving, sharing, printing, and exporting digitized files.Ĭustomization. An OCR app needs to be accurate-no one wants to spend ages editing gibberish text, so I paid attention to how accurately each app produced digitized text from my scans.įile management. This included testing how well each app focused on the document, how accurately the sensor detected borders, and how long it took to capture a scan.Īccuracy. Every app on this list includes some kind of scanning feature, but I paid attention to which apps made the process as painless as possible. Not every app on this list meets all of these criteria, but if you're going to scan with your phone, these are the features you'll want to look for-and it's what I was looking for as I tested.Īuto-scanning. With that in mind, the best OCR software with mobile scanning should excel in a few key areas. That's what will turn your mobile scans into editable digital documents. But if you need to turn your pages into a file you can edit, you'll want optical character recognition (OCR) as part of your mobile scan app. If you don't own a scanner, you can still digitize documents quickly with a mobile scanning app-all of the apps on this list will do the trick. Google Lens for all the Google bells and whistles

Microsoft Lens for quick scanning (and Microsoft users) The best mobile scanning and OCR softwareĪdobe Scan for the best free OCR software I've been updating this article for a couple years, and after testing dozens of mobile scanning and OCR tools, I've handpicked eight that will change the way you manage your documents. I most often use scanning apps for business-related documents and forms of ID, but as you'll see below, you can use these apps for almost any kind of document: books, receipts, certificates, or even a page of your own handwriting.

Lightspeed scanner app