Business Card Scanning Apps

Ditch The Business Card Wallet And Save The Cards On Your iPhone Instead

Overview

Gone are the days when you needed to lug around tens of business cards. With the advent of the iPhone and other smart phones, you can now scan people's contact information right into your phone. In this AppGuide, I'm going to show you the best scanning apps to be found on the AppStore. NB: These apps will work best on iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS, I wouldn't recommend using these apps on an iPhone 3G/2G, iPod 4G or iPad 2.

Essential Apps

Free
Google Search

by Google

Google Search is a great app, it lets you manage all your Google services, and includes a really useful feature called "Google Goggles". Not only does Google Goggles let you accurately scan business cards and save the contact info into your contacts app. Additionally, it lets you search Google simply by taking pictures. You can take a picture of book covers, CD covers, landmarks, foreign text, all sorts of things. Because of how accurately and quickly it scans contact info, and all the extra features, this is an essential app.
$6.99
CamCard - Business card scanner & Business card reader & scan card

by IntSig Information Co.,Ltd

CamCard is probably the best business card reading app on the AppStore. It supports many incredibly useful features, such as: batch scanning, card holder, QR code scanning, exporting to Excel file, auto-crop and many, many more. The batch scanning feature is especially useful. With other apps you have to save the contact info to your phone, then scan again, but with this app you can scan lots of apps at once add them to your contacts in one go. You can even convert your own contact info into a QR code, negating the need to carry around a business card at all. The app also supports LinkedIn search and invites, so as soon as you've scanned someone's business card, you can search their name and send them an invite, all from within the app. This is easily the most full-featured card scanning app I could find on the AppStore.

Notable Apps

$6.99
WorldCard Mobile - business card reader & business card scanner

by Penpower Technology Ltd.

This app has some good features, such as social network addition support and a cool coverflow view for saved business cards, but its other features can be found in other apps, and other apps actually do many of those features better. It only recognises 7 foreign languages, and has fewer capturing features than some of its competitors. This app will integrate with the WorldCard desktop application to back up your saved business cards. However, with iCloud coming in Autumn, that feature could quickly become obsolete.
$6.99
ScanBizCards Business Card Reader

by ScanBiz Mobile Solutions L.P.

A quite nice app for a reasonable price. It doesn't offer as many of the features as some of the others, but it is a bit cheaper as well. It does offer side by side editing, so you can change the scanned text whilst the original picture is on the screen at the same time. You can also make custom fields and scan double sided business cards.

Decent Apps

$3.99
Cardreader - mobile OCR Business Card Reader & Scanner

by x-root Software GmbH

A pretty good, well featured app. No amazing, must-have features, but a good app with support for 15 languages. This app has a coverflow view for viewing scanned cards, and has the option to make the contact picture for scanned business cards the picture you took of the card, which could be useful if the card wasn't transcribed 100% accurately.
$4.99
ABBYY Business Card Reader

by ABBYY

A pretty solid app. It struggled a bit with fancy cards, but it supports 20 languages, including multilingual cards. It also lets you search social networks, merge data with existing contacts, open maps directly, phone the number and send SMS messages from within the app. Its business card library is quite simple, no fancy coverflow here.