It’s easy to exchange a few business cards at a convention but when you actually need to find one, it magically disappears from existence. I’m sure you must feel the same, that’s why I have made a list of the best business card scanner apps that you can install on your iPhone to save all the important contacts and leads. Let’s check those out.
Business Card Scanner Apps for iPhone
1. Microsoft Office Lens
Best For: Storing Business Cards Digitally
Microsoft Office Lens is one of the simplest apps you can find for scanning business cards. It’s a multipurpose scanner that can scan PDFs, digitize documents, and capture whiteboard contents. Along with that, it also has a business card scanning option that can capture the card details accurately.
It doesn’t have any fancy features like OCR and contact extraction but if you want a quick way to digitally store your cards, it’s a decent app that’s completely free.
Get Microsoft Office Lens (free)
2. Adobe Scan
Best For: Scan and Send Business Cards to Adobe Cloud
Adobe Scan is a handheld document and business card scanner for iPhone that’s efficient. It uses OCR to extract contact information and allows you to save it to your iPhone. There are a number of basic editing tools that would make it easier to organize and enhance any document. However, you need to manually save the contact to the iPhone and the OCR is a hit and miss that makes extracting data unreliable.
On the bright side, you can still manually edit the contact details and save the contact to your iPhone. Adobe Scan also lets you save the card image as a PDF file that you can access on any device using Adobe Cloud. One little feature that bugged me while testing this app was that you need to scan the card in the business card mode or it won’t detect the contact information at all. Adobe Scan is free on the App Store.
Get Adobe Scan (free)
3. Genius Scan
Best For: Sharing your Business Cards Easily
Genius Scan is primarily a PDF scanner that also has the feature of scanning your business cards. The app automatically detects business cards and crops them for you. You can also crop it manually if the app fails to do it properly. There are a few basic editing tools such as rotate, and filters that can enhance the contrast of a card. Once the card content is recognized using OCR, the Genius Scan can create a contact on your iPhone and you can easily search it in the Contacts app.
You can easily share them with anyone via email, Google Drive, and other cloud services. Some of the features such as OCR are available in the Genius Scan + app that costs $5 which is fair if you need those features.
Get Genius Scan (free, in-app purchase)
4. ScanBizCards Lite
Best For: Exporting Business Cards to CRMs
ScanBizCards is the perfect companion app for people organizing conventions and networking seminars. It lets you scan business cards on iPhone and conference badges in bulk so that you can generate organic leads quickly and efficiently. After scanning the cards, you can directly export the contacts to Salesforce, Hubspot, Outlook, and Freshsales.
Unlike other apps, you can scan cards in any direction and scan both sides. On top of that, you can add personal notes, and assign contacts to groups which would make the sorting way easier. ScanBizCards Lite has some limitations such as 10 card exports to external CRMs which you can unlock by purchasing the app for $1.
Get ScanBizCards Lite (free, $1)
5. Business Card Scanner HD
Best For: Efficiently Storing Business Cards on iPhone
Business Card Scanner HD for iPhone is beautifully designed and still just as functional as the other apps on the list. The scanner is precise and detects the card in any orientation. It also detects texts on those cards where other apps failed. However, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t free of error. The app automatically detects the contact info and you just need to press one button to add the details to your contact book.
Additionally, you can look up cards based on name, designation, company, etc., and contact the person from within the app. It’s ridiculously intuitive. The app offers a subscription with the price of $49/year.
Get Business Card Scanner HD (free, in-app purchases)
6. Card Scanner by Zoho
Best For: Scanning Business Cards in Different Languages
Card Scanner by Zoho is a well-designed app that lets you optimize your business card storage. It does not have the best OCR but does a decent job of recognizing contact fields. Even if it incorrectly guesses a field, you can place the box in the correct field. The app is also intelligent enough to pull a profile picture from their Twitter handle if they mention the username on the card.
Developed by Zoho, it natively integrates with Zoho CRMs and you can take advantage of that if you use one. Other than Zoho CRM, you can sync contacts with Salesforce and Google Contacts. Additionally, the app supports 14 different languages and you can easily translate non-English business cards. The app is completely free.
Get Card Scanner by Zoho (free)
7. Business Card Reader by ABBYY
Best For: Creating a CSV of your contacts
ABBYY is an incredibly fast scanner for iPhone that also manages your contacts in one place. The app implements OCR and shapes recognition to quickly recognize a business card and the content printed on it without pressing any buttons. During my testing, it performed fairly well but OCR sometimes makes a few errors in recognizing texts, especially when the font is poor. Luckily these errors are not frequent.
All scanned cards are stored with images and the contents extracted from the app. You can even edit and update the information. The app can create a backup of your stored cards which you can access on any device, export as a CSV, and share it with others. Although it’s available with the premium account, you can export contacts to Salesforce account as leads. ABBYY app is free on the App Store and the premium starts at $2.99/mo.
Get Business Card Scanner by ABBYY (free, in-app purchases)
Which Business Card Scanner for iPhone Do You Use
These were a few of the best business card scanner app for the iPhone that you should be using if you have a lot of cards. Using these apps would ensure you get a backup on your iPhone or cloud storage so that even if you lose access to some of the cards, you won’t lose the leads. Which app do you use? Let me know on Twitter.
Also Read: Top 7 CamScanner Alternatives You Should Try
