9 great PDF scanner apps you should use instead of Microsoft Lens

There comes a time when all great apps must die, especially if Microsoft owns them. Redmond has taken many tools away from me, from Sunrise Calendar to Wunderlist, and now it’s hooking Microsoft Lens from the stage. The PDF scanner app made it easy to grab physical documents and transform them into digital copies without a bulky scanner. It was nothing fancy, but it did its job effortlessly.

While Lens is undoubtedly one of the more useful tools Microsoft has given Android, there are plenty of alternatives you should now turn to instead. For those office-related tasks of signing documents digitally, scanning book pages page by page, or keeping tabs of receipts, here are the best PDF scanner apps you should opt for instead.

If you can forgive Microsoft for migrating Lens’ features into its other products, you may as well stay within the company’s ambit. OneDrive is perhaps the best candidate for your PDF scanning needs, as it now houses many of Lens’ core functionalities.

While Lens was free to use, OneDrive requires a login to access its scanning features. The app also has an annoying habit of bombarding users with cloud storage offers before they can access the scanning functionality. Bad form, Microsoft.

Nevertheless, the scanning experience on OneDrive is as simple as pointing and shooting, even if it lacks Lens’s more nuanced features, like file type selection and OCR.

In the other cloud storage platform corner, we have Google Drive. This is the Microsoft Lens alternative you most likely have on your Android phone already, so you won’t need to download anything else.

Drive makes scanning documents even simpler thanks to its automatic scanning feature. It also offers various visual editing tools, like a cleaning tool and an automatic adjustments button. Google’s tool also gives users more control, allowing them to choose between saving in PDF or JPEG, the location of that save, and the preferred Google account. This is particularly useful if you want to scan images for work without storing them on your personal Google cloud.

Overall, Google Drive is better than OneDrive as a Microsoft Lens alternative, but it’s not a Lens equivalent.

Looking further afield to an open-source PDF scanner, we have the OSS Document Scanner. Unlike OneDrive and Google Drive, OSS is purpose-built for scanning documents, giving it a leg up over these more general tools.

I really like the app’s clean UI, which throws all of its toys into the functional bucket but leaves one or two for form. Like Drive, it automatically detects the document you wish to scan and snaps it on your behalf. It also crops the image to best fit, which can be annoying if there’s a lot of text on a larger document, like a poster. Nevertheless, scan quality is adequate if not remarkable.

OSS Document Scanner offers various image editing and enhancement tools and OCR smarts, which certainly come in handy if you ever need to extract text from a file. There are also myriad document quality and size options, including a JPEG quality slider, a size threshold option (convenient), and various security settings. Users can even lock the app behind biometrics, which is perfect if you use the PDF scanner to grab sensitive documents.

Now for the custodian of the PDF format’s challenger: Adobe Scan. This app is advantageous if you use other Adobe apps to process PDFs. It can scan documents and send them to Acrobat Reader for additional edits and easy signature insertion. That’s a big positive if your scans constantly require your personal squiggle on them. It also offers several security and practical features, like setting a password on a scan or combining multiple files into one.

Then there are the AI-fueled features. Adobe talks up Scan’s ability to find content within scans when prompted, which I don’t think I’ll ever need to use in such an app. Nevertheless, if you scan meeting minutes and want to know precisely who pitched a winning idea, you can search directly within the scan for those details.

Annoyingly, you cannot access any of these features — or even the base functionality — without setting up an Adobe account.

Known as Clear Scan on the Play Store and Clear Scanner in the app, this PDF scanner offers plenty of features that the other apps on this list lack. For one, you can pick the scanning resolution (albeit two options) and set up a default email forwarding address with a pre-filled subject line.

Clear Scan offers a really clean UI, with a left flyout menu and the option to create folders for organizational purposes.

The scanning performance is solid, and the OCR smarts reliably pull text from your snaps. There’s also an option to add notes to scans, add signatures (you can also scan your signature — very meta), and save scans as PDFs at the quality of your choosing.

Clear Scan is definitely one of the star picks on this list. It packs plenty of useful features without feeling too bloated or overdesigned. It is worth noting that there is a free ad-supported version, but paying a one-time fee removes these forever.

I covered PDFgear Scan in a separate review, but to offer the basics, it’s a feature-full PDF scanner that includes a handful of AI smarts. It’s competing directly with Adobe Scan in this regard, and I don’t quite require such a feature. Nevertheless, where PDFgear Scan really stands out is its receipt scanning and management smarts. When scanning a till slip, the app automatically grabs data from the receipts and populates them in an easily perusable table. It automatically highlights the tax paid, total paid, number of items purchased, and more.

Beyond that, it includes the usual PDF scanner smarts: OCR, options to save that text in a Microsoft Word file, special scanning modes for books, IDs, and QR codes, and a robust set of organizational features.

Beyond that PDFgear Scan lacks some of the deeper customization features in Clear Scan and OSS Document Scanner. Nevertheless, the results it provides are reliable and fuss-free.

If you’re a big fan of autoscanning, Genius Scan offers the best example of all products on this list. It’s as easy as highlighting the document you wish to scan, and boom, the app perfectly grabs and centers the information. I also found its editing and enhancement features the best apps I’ve tried, even smoothing out the scanlines and pixel marks when scanning a screen. Moreover, Genius Scan also includes a curvature correction feature, which bends wonky pages back into shape. This works a treat.

Beyond these smarts, Genius offers plenty of organization options, including via tags and folders. Then, there are options to export scans to several services, including Dropbox, OneNote, a WebDAV server, and more. You will need to pay for its Ultra premium tier for this, which costs a fair bit of cash annually.

Although Genius Scan’s Play Store listing notes that it includes OCR support, I couldn’t find this option within the app. Clearly, it could use some UI reorganization, especially if I were to purchase the Ultra version.

SwiftScan is perhaps the most feature-packed app on this list, but this is only telling half the story. The app offers many tools that home office and work-from-home users will undoubtedly appreciate. If you’re stuck in the 1990s, you can send scans as faxes from this app. Alternatively, it supports scans in PDF, image files, and text files, the import of signatures, edits on scanned PDF documents, and built-in translation and AI summarization features.

All this sounds good on paper, but SwiftScan has a few annoyances if you aren’t willing to pay. For one, scans include “Scanned with SwiftScan” watermarks that you can only remove if you pay a monthly or annual subscription fee. If you want to save files to its many supported platforms, you’ll also need to unlock the premium version. Notably, OCR is also locked behind a premium wall.

The app includes a lot of bloat, too, whether in-app flyers that beg for your email address or constant notification permission requests. I’m also not enamored by its UI, which feels scattershot and too focused on pushing users towards its premium features.

Finally, we get to Notebloc. This PDF scanner has an approachable UI that’s a little more hands-on than other apps on this list. There’s no automatic scanning feature, so you’ll need to frame, snap, and adjust the borders of the scan on your own. After all the options above, I found this app a little tedious.

Nevertheless, once the scan is saved in the app, you can add markup to the scan or grab text using OCR. Notably, I found its OCR performance lacking, especially compared to PDFgear Scan and Clear Scan, but I did prefer its markup UI to the other apps above.

Notebloc is free to use, but the app is ad-supported. You can remove these by purchasing a monthly or annual subscription or purchasing the app outright. That lifetime unlock is far cheaper than SwiftScan’s yearly fee, though.