The best scanning apps

Never bother with a scanner again. Thanks to high-quality cameras on today's top smartphones and nifty behind-the-scenes tech, scanning a document or photo with great results is as easy as opening an app and snapping a picture.

Here are top picks for the best apps to turn your phone into a scanner.


Best scanning app for iOS: Evernote Scannable

Evernote, the popular note-taking service, has built a fantastic free scanning app called Scannable. It's useful for scanning receipts, business cards and in particular, printed documents.

That's because the app uses optical character recognition (OCR), which can detect the letters and numbers on whatever you scan so that you can search for words or phrases within the scanned digital document. The app's OCR feature works automatically, analyzing documents for words and characters as you make the scan. It also uses this feature to pull information from a business card, like emails and phone numbers, so you can save it to your phone. It's one of the best solutions I've found for digitizing business cards.


Best scanning app for Android: CamScanner

For scanning documents with your phone, it's very hard to beat CamScanner. This free app covers all the basics, plus much more.

The app uses your phone's camera to scan printed documents, receipts, business cards and even words and doodles on a whiteboard. When you finish a scan, CamScanner analyzes the content of the image to automatically organize everything by type. That means, all of your business card scans are saved in one folder, while documents go in another. As an added bonus, the app also lets you create scans from photos you've previously taken. Most importantly, the scan quality is stellar, though your mileage may vary by your phone's camera.