An Adobe Scan alternative with no sign-in and free OCR

Why people look for an Adobe Scan alternative

Adobe Scan has a lot going for it: good edge detection, a bulk scan mode, and a handy link to Acrobat Reader. Its free tier is generous compared with many scanner apps. The friction tends to come from three places.

First, sign-in: Adobe Scan asks you to sign in with an Adobe account. Second, the cloud: scans are saved to Adobe Document Cloud, and some reviewers say the upload slows down sharing. Third, limits: in our research the free tier caps text recognition at 5 pages, with more pages and combining scans into one file part of the paid plans.

At the time of writing, Adobe Scan Plus costs $19.99 a year on the US App Store, and Premium tiers cost more. Recent reviews also mention repeated subscribe prompts and crashes on long scans. None of this is a scandal; it is just a different trade-off from the one Scanfone makes.

Scanfone vs Adobe Scan at a glance

Adobe Scan details are from its US App Store listing and recent reviews at the time of writing and may change.

Free text recognition that stays on your phone

The biggest practical difference is OCR. In Scanfone, text recognition runs on your iPhone for every page you scan or import, with no page cap and no upload. Your PDFs become searchable, you can copy text out of them, and the search box in Scanfone looks inside every document you have. If you want to know how that works, read how to make a PDF searchable.

Because nothing leaves the phone unless you turn on Pro sync, there is no cloud folder full of your tax letters that you did not ask for.

What else Scanfone does for free

All of that works without an account and without ads.

• Scan with Apple's document camera, which finds edges and fixes perspective
• Unlimited multi-page PDFs; import photos and PDFs
• Filters, rotate, reorder and delete pages
• Folders, search, share, print and save to Files
• Modes for documents, ID cards, passports and QR codes
• Sign, add text, watermark, page numbers, redact, merge, split and compress PDFs
• PDF to JPG, PDF to text and photos to PDF
• A Safe folder locked with a PIN and Face ID

The honest catch

Free PDFs carry one small line under each page: "Scanned free with Scanfone". It is not a watermark over your content.

Scanfone Pro removes that line and adds sync between your phones, a 1 TB cloud backup on EU servers (Hetzner) and export to Word and PowerPoint. It costs $2.99 for the first year, then $19.99 a year, which is the same yearly price as Adobe Scan Plus at the time of writing. There is no email-and-password account: the App Store purchase is the account, and other phones join with a one-time code. Details on pricing.

When Adobe Scan is the better pick

If you live in Acrobat, need Adobe's AI features, or want scans in Adobe Document Cloud so you can open them on the web, Adobe Scan fits that workflow well. If you want a fast scanner that keeps files on your phone, needs no sign-in and does OCR for free, try Scanfone. Still comparing? See the best free scanner app or how Scanfone stacks up against the iPhone Notes scanner.