Adobe Scan vs. Office Lens

Adobe Scan allows you to point the camera and capture the photo. Office Lens detects the document, but you must tap the button to take the picture. Regarding document edge detection, Adobe Scan does a better job.

Office Lens is slower and less accurate than Adobe Scan, but you can crop the captured photo if you can’t get the edges right.

Adobe Scan supports document, business card, whiteboard, and form scan types, whereas Office Lens offers document, business card, whiteboard, and photo scanning.

Multi-page capture

We have talked about Adobe Scan’s auto-detect and capture feature. This feature comes in handy when you have multiple pages.

You must put the object in the front, and the app will do the rest. Office Lens also offers to take various pages at once.

While you are here: Office Lens or CamScanner

Angle capture

Angle Scan in Office Lens

Both offer to capture photos at angles. Look at the comparison photo to see how both perform the angle operation.

The problem with Adobe Scan is it takes a lot of time to find the document, and sometimes it does not find it.

However, if you manually take a picture, the app will detect the document and show you the photo.

Document quality

Adobe Scan vs Office Lens — Business Card Scan (Adobe Scan top and Office Lens bottom)

After scanning business cards and documents at the same distance, I discovered Adobe Scan is brighter than Office Lens.

Adobe Scan adds light to scans and gives them a scanned document look. In Office Lens, you browse through filters to find the perfect color, as the default color is not promising most of the time.

After scanning features

Once a document has been scanned, both apps show the following options:

Retake
Crop
Rotate
Filters
Markup (draw)
Resize
Reorder

Adobe Scan also has a few additional features:

Adjust (brightness and contrast)
Cleanup (clean dark spots and lines)

Exporting documents

Adobe Scan exports in PDF format, while saving as an image option can be enabled in Preferences.

One thing I don’t like about Adobe Scan is all the files are stored in the cloud. There is no option to save the document on the phone. You also need to log in with Adobe ID before using the app.

Depending on the document, Office Lens shows the export formats. For example, scanning a business card will see options, including saving it as an image.

Scanning a document shows save as PDF as well. If you are logged in, scans are kept in the cloud by default.

We also see OneDrive, Word, and PowerPoint options to save documents to the cloud or further edit them in a different app.

Both offer automatically detecting and saving contact details when you scan a business card.

Read next: Adobe Scan versus CamScanner

Adobe Scan vs. Office Lens: Other features

Adobe Scan

The app supports filling out forms and signing them. You can also edit a document after saving it.

Office Lens

Office Lens has a set of advanced options called Actions. You can capture text and translate it into other languages. You can also scan tables and save them separately.

Moreover, its immersive reader can read scanned documents.

Which one is for you

Adobe Scan has a few more document scanning options; however, you must have an Adobe account.

If you already have an Adobe account and want to access your scans on multiple devices, Adobe Scan is for you.

Office Lens is great for angle capture, and it has additional options. If you use Microsoft products, you should use Office Lens.

In terms of quality, it all comes down to filters. You can get the same quality documents in both with filters.

Adobe Scan vs. Office Lens: Install

Madhsudhan Khemchandani

Madhsudhan Khemchandani has a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering (Honours). He has been writing articles on apps and software for over five years. He has also made over 200 videos on his YouTube channel. Read more about him on the about page.

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