Business card scanning apps

If you’ve ever exchanged business cards with someone, you’ll know it’s a really convenient way of swapping contact information – as long as you put their details in your address book. This week, we’ve reviewed 5 business card scanning apps that let you take a photo of a business card and save the information into your contacts – in most cases, instantly.

All of our apps this week were tested on iOS 4.3.3 on an iPhone 4. All of these apps were found on the iOS App Store.

#5 – HotCard Lite
HotCard looked like a good app on the App Store. Unfortunately, though, when we tested it, it didn’t deliver at all – we scanned our card, but before the app gave us the reading, it crashed! I don’t know if it was just incompatible with the phone we used, but it crashed completely. Also, when we were taking the photo, there were no image stabilisation features – you’ll see what we mean by this later. Not a fantastic app.

#4 – ScanBizCards Lite
ScanBizCards didn’t crash when we scanned the card. It can scan both sides of a card if you tell it to, which is good, and you can get it to send the contact you’ve just scanned an email introducing yourself with your vCard attached. However, it is quite inaccurate, which isn’t great, and can read contact information from your camera (you take a photo live) or a saved photo, but it can’t read information from email signatures (I’ll explain this in just a sec). It’s OK, but not great.

#3 – CardMunch
CardMunch was just acquired by LinkedIn and so have gone completely free. However, for an app by LinkedIn, you’d expect it to be a little better. All the cards are checked by humans and not done digitally, which makes it very slow. Also, even though it’s being read by a human, it’s inaccurate – getting our card’s phone number wrong and missing out some information. We didn’t measure how long it took, but we can tell you this much – it took more than 24 hours. More than one day to scan a card that I coud have manually transcribed in under ten minutes. Really? Also, you can only scan from the camera, not saved photos or an email signature. This is only just at position 3.

#2 – CamCard Lite
CamCard was quite like CardMunch in terms of accuracy. It missed a couple of things, which made it annoying, but was fully computerised so delivered results instantly. At least with that method you can correct it, instead of having to wait about a week before you can even see the scan. You can scan from your camera, a saved photo or an email signature, which is good. The email signature thingy works by allowing you to paste an email signature into a big text box and then picking out which information is which. That’s pretty neat. It also reads QR codes, but there are dozens of other apps that do that anyway. There is also image stabilisation, where you press the button and the phone takes the photo when your hand is steady. There’s batch scanning too, you take a lot of images in sequence and it decodes them all afterwards (good for scanning all of the cards you collected that day when you get back home or to the hotel room). There were some annoying little errors (it spelled Rick Chapman’s name as Rick Chairman), but these are minimised with built-in cropping and photo enhancement. This is a very strong 2 – it just got beat by our number 1, but it is a close second.

Before we get to our number 1, please remember that we have only ever used the Lite versions of these apps. In the paid versions (where present), the accuracy may be better and there may be more features.

#1 – WorldCard Mobile Lite
In our tests, WorldCard’s accuracy was flawless. It provides nearly instant results and it worked on multiple cards. Image stabilisation and cropping is there, and you can scan from camera, photo library or an email signature. It even shows you the part of the image it read when you tap a piece of information so you can check for errors. With all these features and almost no noticeable flaws, this wins our HackIt number one business card scanning app.

Coming soon: Business card scanning apps for Android – there are a lot of them, some the same as the iPhone ones – but do they stack up? Find out in our next Top 5…