Business card scanning apps present a modern solution to a decades-old problem. Now, with the click of a button, you can scan business cards directly into your phone and store an unlimited number of contacts. Plus, the best business card scanner app doesn't stop with scanning and storage—it comes with plenty of other features that can help you be more efficient, organized, and connected.

To help you find the right business card scanner software, I tested several dozen apps—including the ones already included in your phone, CRM apps with card scanners, and those designed with both general and specific users in mind. A lot of the options are starting to share the same features, so I narrowed the list down to the five that do it best.

Here are my picks for the five best business card scanners. Click on any app to learn more about why I chose it, or keep reading for more context on business card readers.

The best business card scanner apps

• BizConnect for accuracy

• ABBYY BCR for ease of use

• Haystack for the best free business card scanner app

• HiHello for customization

• Covve for maintaining relationships

• Plus, more ways to scan business cards

What makes the best business card scanner app?

To find the best business card scanning app, I started by compiling a list of basically every option out there. I then downloaded each app, set up my accounts, and tested each one with two business cards: one with a simple design that I knew should be easy for any solid app to scan, and one with a busy layout that I thought might trip up even the best options. 

From there, I assessed each app against five main criteria:

• Accuracy. Whether or not names, emails, phone numbers, and any other information listed on the cards were captured correctly.

• Ease of use. How intuitive the app was to maneuver around.

• Contact storage. How the app handles contact management.

• Integration and sharing options. The amount and variety of options available for exporting or syncing contacts with other platforms, such as email clients and CRMs.

• Organization. The ability to organize, tag, and group contacts as desired.

Additionally, I looked for apps that had special features, such as multi-card capture, AI, design suites, and company contact management capabilities.

The best business card scanner apps at a glance

Best business card scanner app for accuracy

BizConnect (Android, iOS)

BizConnect pros:

• Great for accuracy

• Really intuitive to use

• Extra features, including task setting and reports

BizConnect cons:

• Verification for accuracy can take up to 5 minutes

BizConnect produces the closest I found to perfect scan accuracy. It's the only app that consistently found and linked social media accounts, captured blurry and unusual fonts, and identified words that the others just missed. What's unique about the scanning process here is that it goes through a verification phase to ensure extra accuracy. It took about five minutes for my most difficult business card, but I could still see all the contact info while this verification took place—it's just an added layer of accuracy.

BizConnect is also easy to use and thoughtfully designed to give users plenty of features without feeling overwhelmed. From the Holder screen, you'll find all of your contacts with their card image, name, title, company, and when they were added. Next to each contact is a handy options menu that lets you call, email, and share without having to even open the card. At the top of this screen are color-coded options to export, import, add to CRM, and perform other actions. The scan button is prominently displayed at the bottom.

Clicking Scan gives options to scan a single card (front and back), a QR code, or scan in batch, which means scanning one card after the other. Once scanned, you'll get a processing message, and within a few minutes, you'll have a completed contact. Though it's a bit slower than other apps on this list, it's worth the wait.

In addition to stellar scans, it also comes with task setting, activity tracking, and reports showing daily and monthly leads captured. There's even a barebones CRM where you can add deal stages, tasks, and activities with a revenue feature tracking all won deals. Integrating your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, and Pipedrive) is easy by connecting your accounts and selecting the contacts you want to export.

Or, if you want to connect to a different app, you can do that with BizConnect's Zapier integrations. Zapier lets you connect BizConnect to thousands of apps, so you can do things like automatically add all new BizConnect business contacts to other apps—and vice versa. Here are a couple examples.

BizConnect price: Free plan can scan up to 600 cards; paid plans from 6.99/user/month

Best iPhone business card scanner app for ease of use 

ABBYY BCR (iOS)

ABBYY BCR pros:

• Very accurate scans

• Intuitive to use

• Contactless card sharing with QR codes

ABBYY BCR cons:

• Android version is no longer in service

ABBYY is one of the most popular business card scanner apps on the market, and for good reason. The app's simplicity and accuracy are its main selling points. After you scan, it highlights digits or letters that it's not 100% certain about in a different color—though, in my experience, everything was spot-on. 

As far as storage goes, you have a variety of options: you can keep contacts in the app's Cardholder, share them to your phone's contacts, and/or send them to Salesforce. A nice touch is the choice to do all three of these at once right after you finish your scan, so you don't have to go back and manually save contacts to different places one at a time. You can also export contacts as a CSV.

Besides the usual fields, like name, phone number, and address, you'll also be able to add Facebook and LinkedIn information for your contacts—and for your own digital business card. And like other apps on this list, the business card can be presented as a QR code for contactless sharing. 

I tested this app on my iPhone, but if you're an Android user, be aware that as of August 2023, ABBYY no longer accepts new subscriptions or in-app purchases for the Android version, and it discontinued support as of September 2023. This could be a dealbreaker for some, but for iPhone users like myself, ABBYY is a solid option. It might not have some of the flashier features of other apps, but it covers all the essentials for a business card scanner app, including Salesforce integration, contact export options, and regular automatic backups.

ABBYY BCR price: Free version available; $7.99/month or $29.99/year

Best free business card scanner app

Haystack (iOS, Android)

Haystack pros:

• It's completely free to use—no surprise charges

• Vibrant visual representations of each card

• Automatically fills in information gaps via web search

• Contact syncing from your phone list

Haystack cons:

• No integrations with other apps

• No contact grouping

Haystack was by far the most advanced app I tested when it comes to contact details. It doesn't just scan and store the information from a business card; it also goes out of its way to find more information on the web. For example, once I scanned my first card, it presented me with a series of company logos associated with the website listed on the card and asked me to pick one. The app even created a digital card from the scan, and it used the colors from the logo as a color scheme for the contact profile.

Haystack is big on the visuals, so if you like to actually see all your cards instead of just text and names, you'll be happy to see digital representations of all the cards in your deck. You can even create your own digital cards with Haystack—as many as you want, so long as they don't have the same email address. Plus, you can share your cards with others via email, SMS, and QR code. If you needed to, you could also share other people's contact info this way.

The Contact Syncing feature proved to be very useful: it lets you sync any of your Haystack contacts to your phone's contacts app. I was also able to make edits to the contacts after the fact and see those edits updated within my phone's main contacts app—pretty nifty.

Beyond these features, the app doesn't offer much as far as integrations or contact grouping, but for a free app (that's also ad-free), Haystack is a solid choice.

Haystack price: Free

Best business card scanner app for customization

HiHello (iOS, Android)

HiHello pros:

• Plenty of customization options

• Great scanning accuracy

• Wide range of social media fields

HiHello cons:

• Honestly, nothing worth mentioning

HiHello stands out with a user-friendly and intuitive interface. Right from the start, it guides you through a seamless process of entering your personal details—including your name, title, company, and phone number—to effortlessly create your personalized digital business card. A notable feature of HiHello is the ability to have separate work and personal cards (similar to Haystack) with multiple sharing options, like QR code, email, text, and even Apple Wallet.

Customization is another strong suit of the app. It allows for a variety of personal touches, including color choices, layout designs, logos, and links to social media platforms. It neatly categorizes these platforms into sections like Communication, Payment, and Music, providing options beyond the usual business card staples like LinkedIn and Facebook. You can even add less conventional ones like Venmo, Spotify, and Twitch.

Scanning accuracy is very precise—I didn't need to modify any fields, but the app provides the option to review or retake scans if necessary. It automatically sorts contacts into work or personal categories post-scan, but this can be manually edited.

As far as integrations, HiHello syncs with Google Contacts, allowing seamless access across both platforms. But if you want to integrate with thousands of other apps, you can use Zapier. Here are a few pre-made workflows to get you started.

HiHello price: Free plan available; paid plans from $6/month

Best business card reader app for maintaining relationships

Covve (iOS, Android)

Covve pros:

• Great for follow-up reminders

• Intuitive, friendly interface

• Ability to log your activity and interactions

Covve cons:

• Less structured because it's more of personal CRM

Do you ever struggle with remembering to follow up with people? I definitely do, which is why I was delighted to discover that Covve not only scans business cards and stores your contacts, but it also helps you maintain your relationships with these contacts.

When it comes to communication, Covve gives you the option to contact people via call, SMS, email, and WhatsApp. Then, after you've communicated, you can mark people that you've contacted recently, so you know who you've covered and who still needs some attention. Once you've scanned and saved a contact, you can also take advantage of the auto-remind option so that you can set a duration for how often you want to reach out to someone. You can do this by frequency, like every week, or you can pick a specific week on the calendar. The app will also let you know which reminders are coming up during the current week, which reminders are in the future, and it'll also let you know if you missed any reminders. It's like a little CRM.

Because it isn't your typical business card scanning or contact storage app, Covve doesn't hold contacts in one place alphabetically or by date added like some other apps. In fact, it classifies contacts as "relationships." When you scan in one of these new relationships, the app will automatically add a reminder alert for every three months, but it'll also ask you when you last spoke to the contact. From there, you can add tags or any other general notes.

To streamline tasks even further, Covve also offers an AI assistant you can access through the settings. The assistant helps with simplifying data entry: you can forward your emails and some instructions to a special email address provided by Covve, and the AI will organize the data in Covve. You can even set reminders to contact someone. The email they provide is quite long and complex, but you can change the assistant's email to a custom one that's easier to remember and type.

As far as scanning accuracy goes, even my most difficult business card was transcribed correctly with minimal effort, which was just the cherry on top of this already very solid app.

Plus, you can use Zapier to connect Covve to thousands of other apps, so you can automatically create new contacts in your other apps whenever you scan a card into Covve. Here are a couple of examples to get you started.

Covve price: Free plan gives you 20 contacts, auto-reminders, activity logs, and tagging; $12.99/month or $119.99/year for the Pro plan which comes with unlimited everything

Other ways to scan business cards

Only occasionally need to scan business cards? You actually might not need a dedicated app just for cards. Instead, you could use the scanner tools built into an app you already use to capture cards and copy text—and then manually save contacts to your address book.

• Evernote Scannable. The popular notebook app Evernote happens to also have an app for scanning business cards. Scan a business card, and Evernote will usually automatically recognize and store it as a Business Card, with fields for the contact info along with a picture of the card and any notes you want. You can then save the contact to your address book or have Evernote remind you to stay in touch.

  

• OneNote. Then there's OneNote, Microsoft's alternative to Evernote. Using its companion Microsoft Office Lens app, you can scan business cards and other documents and save them to your OneNote notebook for free. On your Mac or Windows desktop, you can then right-click on the business card scans in OneNote and copy the text, then add it to your address book.

• Google Lens. Google Lens could be used as an alternative Android business card scanner, as it's built into most newer Android phones. While it may not be the best scanning app for Android, it's certainly the easiest to get started with. Simply take a picture of your card, tap the Lens icon, and save to your phone's contacts.

• CamCard (Business). CamCard scanner is a great option for anyone who needs their business cards to be more dynamic. If you work in different industries, you can have multiple digital cards for different roles (like Haystack and HiHello). The app also provides valuable insights about how your cards are viewed and the number of connections you make. The only drawback to using this app is the unpredictability of the scanning accuracy.

• ScanContacts. The ultimate free business scanning app for HubSpot users is ScanContacts. You will need to sign into your HubSpot to use the app, but once you're in, you can count on ScanContacts to automatically save all your new scanned contacts into the CRM.

• Eight. In addition to its superb scanning accuracy, another neat feature is the ability to easily share contact info with other Eight users via Bluetooth. If the person you want to share with isn't an Eight user, you can also just send your contact info via QR code or URL.

• Google Drive or other OCR tool. You could also use a dedicated scanner app or the OCR tool built into Google Drive. Those apps can work well at recognizing text—though again, you'll need to do the hard work of copying the recognized text and putting it to work.

• CRM. If your team uses a CRM app to manage your contacts and customers, its mobile app may have business card scanning built-in. HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM, Insightly, Nutshell, and noCRM, among others, include business card scanning in their mobile apps. Zoho's scanner's accuracy is very good, but the app is standalone and not included in the CRM app. HubSpot's app, on the other hand, includes the scanner in its mobile CRM app (as do Nutshell and noCRM) and is free forever.

So before you add another app to your stack, it's worth checking to see if an app you already have will do the trick.

With the number of digital business cards and contactless QR code-sharing capabilities that so many apps have today, it'll be interesting to see how these apps evolve beyond the need to scan physical cards.

Related reading:

• What is a personal CRM—and should you use one?

• The best free CRM software

• Forget networking—connect with people because they're interesting

Originally published in November 2017 by Matthew Guay, this article also has contributions from Hannah Herman and Chris Hawkins. The most recent update was in December 2023.