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A full PDF toolkit with on-device OCR, app lock, and a lifetime purchase option. Free to start.
A fair side-by-side comparison of two iPhone scanner apps. Microsoft Lens is free and tightly integrated with Microsoft 365 — ScanLens is a more capable PDF toolkit. Here is the honest difference.
We make ScanLens. That makes us biased. We have tried to write this fairly. Microsoft Lens is a genuinely strong free product, especially for people already inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. There are workflows where Lens is the right answer. There are also workflows where ScanLens is. This page covers both honestly. If anything is wrong, email [email protected] and we will update it.
Pricing and features change. Verify current details on each app's App Store listing before deciding.
Values current as of April 2026. Microsoft Lens data verified from its App Store listing and Microsoft's official help documentation.
| Feature | ScanLens | Microsoft Lens |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | iPhone, iPad (iOS 18+) | iOS, Android |
| Price | Free / $4.99 mo / $29.99 yr / $79.99 lifetime | Free (no premium tier) |
| Account required | No | Optional for capture, required for cloud features |
| OCR processing | On-device (Apple Vision) | Cloud-based (Microsoft servers) |
| OCR languages | 50+ | 30+ |
| Offline OCR | Yes | No — requires internet |
| Capture modes | Document, ID card, passport, business card, book | Document, Whiteboard, Business Card, Photo |
| Whiteboard mode | No | Yes |
| Book scanning (page split) | Yes | No |
| Cloud sync targets | iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive | OneDrive, OneNote, Word, PowerPoint, SharePoint |
| Direct to OneNote / Word | No (export then import) | Yes — one-tap |
| PDF merge / split | Yes (premium) | No |
| PDF compression | Yes (premium) | No |
| Password-protected PDFs | Yes (AES-256, premium) | No |
| PDF annotation / drawing | Yes (premium) | Limited |
| Watermark PDFs | Yes (premium) | No |
| E-signatures | Yes (premium) | No native |
| Excel (XLSX) export | Yes (premium) | Yes |
| Word (DOCX) export | Yes (premium) | Yes |
| App Lock (Face ID) | Yes | No |
| Ads | None | None |
Microsoft Lens and ScanLens are not really the same kind of product, even though they share the "scanner app" label. Microsoft Lens is a capture tool built to feed Microsoft 365 — its job is to get a clean image of a document into OneNote, Word, OneDrive, or SharePoint as fast as possible. It does that very well, and it is free.
ScanLens is a document toolkit. Capture is one of the things it does, but most of what it does happens after the capture: organize, OCR locally, merge, split, compress, password protect, annotate, sign, watermark, export to PDF/DOCX/XLSX, and sync to your cloud of choice. This is what justifies the premium tier.
If you only need to take a clean picture and shove it into OneNote, Lens is genuinely the right answer and it costs nothing. If you need to actually work with PDFs after scanning — sending signed contracts, archiving compressed documents, building searchable libraries — ScanLens has the tools and Lens does not.
Yes. Microsoft Lens (formerly Office Lens) is completely free with no premium tier. There are no in-app purchases for additional features. It is funded as a strategic part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem rather than as a standalone product.
Microsoft Lens integrates directly with Microsoft 365 — sending scans to OneNote, Word, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and SharePoint. It also has a Whiteboard mode optimized for capturing meeting whiteboards and a Business Card mode that exports to OneNote. If you live inside Microsoft 365, that integration is hard to beat. ScanLens does not target the Microsoft ecosystem specifically — it syncs to OneDrive but not directly to OneNote, Word, or PowerPoint.
Yes, by a wide margin. Microsoft Lens is a focused capture tool — it scans, enhances, and exports. ScanLens includes a full set of PDF tools: merge, split, compress, password protect, annotate, watermark, sign, and convert to Word or Excel. If you only need to capture and send to OneNote, Lens is enough. If you need to actually work with PDFs after scanning, ScanLens has more tooling.
Both produce strong OCR results for printed text. Microsoft Lens uses Microsoft's cloud OCR, which has been refined over many years on Office documents. ScanLens uses Apple's Vision framework on-device, which avoids any cloud upload. For offline use, ScanLens is the only option of the two — Microsoft Lens needs a connection for OCR and cloud export.
Microsoft Lens can be used without signing in for basic capture, but most useful features — saving to OneDrive, OneNote, or SharePoint — require a Microsoft account. ScanLens does not require any account to use the full feature set.
A full PDF toolkit with on-device OCR, app lock, and a lifetime purchase option. Free to start.