We might live in a mostly paperless world, but plenty of important stuff still turns up on paper. If you’re keen to declutter, you need a document scanner for your iPhone.
Apple’s own Notes does a solid job. Open a note, tap …and choose Scan and the app will automatically capture, crop, and save one or several pages in a row to PDF. Scans sit within your notes, but you can tap a scan’s title and use Share or Save to Files to send your PDF elsewhere.
For occasional use, Notes is fine. But if you scan documents regularly, a dedicated app can be faster and more flexible. Here are our favorite options from the App Store.
Simple Scan ($10/£10 per year or $30/£30 lifetime)
Best for ease of use
Simple Scan feels like the smarter sibling of the Notes scanner. It has the same quick capture and accurate cropping, but with better workflow control. You can set a preferred format, destination type, and image quality. With a minute’s extra work, you can also set up custom destinations (to specific people and places with Mail, Files, and Messages) and have the app prompt for a name before it saves a file.
Once a scan has been captured, you can tap the thumbnail to adjust its filter, cropping, and rotation, or to delete pages. Unfortunately, pages can’t be rearranged, but exported scans retain selectable text that you can copy and paste. Also, you can change the app’s key color, which is entirely unnecessary but further cements the app’s friendly nature.
It might seem odd to recommend paying for an app with fewer features than some of its rivals, but Simple Scan’s one-off lifetime option isn’t too bad. And for regular users, the app’s immediacy and fast, fuss-free scanning that doesn’t even attempt to lock you into an ecosystem or bespoke file system is a boon.
QuickScan (free + optional donations)
Best free iPhone scanner
This is an odd one. The VIP splash screen whiffs of dodgy apps that try to ‘trick’ you into a pricey subscription. But QuickScan quickly turns out to be one of the good guys. Because once you dismiss that screen, everything is free – and mostly superb.
The app ably handles single or multi-page scans. Once a scan’s saved, QuickScan offers intuitive tools for filters, drag-and-drop page arrangement, and export, including the means to define favorites. Its text preview is excellent too, allowing you to preview what’s been captured and export just the words in raw text or formatted fashion; this feature also means the app has full text search for stashed scans. It’s all done on-device too.
Downsides? You can import PDFs from elsewhere, but can’t merge documents nor split existing ones. Splash screen aside, that’s about it. In all, this is the best no-cost scanning option around for iPhone. (And, note, if you do later decide to support the developer – and please do – donation options are tucked away in the … menu.)
Scanner Pro ($30/£27 per year)
Best for document management
Scanner Pro is another quality effort that makes scanning painless. Its speedy capture produces good quality scans that retain text information for extraction in PDF readers. You can reorder pages within multi-page files, and also use the app to import other documents, extract pages, and merge PDFs. Once you have the PDF concoction you’re after, it can sit in Scanner Pro or be sent elsewhere via a multi-step custom workflow.
The app has some other nice features. It can export text, albeit slightly less elegantly than QuickScan, and it assigns types to scans that make it a cinch to find specific kinds of documents later, if you keep them in Scanner Pro. You can also auto-upload backups to a range of cloud services (although, curiously, not iCloud).
It’s worth noting the free version is basically a demo, locking many features and even watermarking basic scans. Still, if you scan often and want the distinct tools the app offers, the subscription is worth consideration.
Also consider…
Genius Scan (free or $40/£40 per year): In a similar space to Scanner Pro, but with a more generous free tier that includes OCR, document merging, and no watermarking.
Tiny Scanner ($10/£10 per month or $20/£20 per year): Hides basically everything behind a paywall but notable for its PIN-protected vault and custom watermarks.
Adobe Scan (free or $10/£10 per month): If you’re already in Adobe’s ecosystem, this app integrates with Creative Cloud, but on its own doesn’t stack up against its rivals at this price.