Remember the Rolodex? The toylike office accessory was originally designed to allow professionals to thumb through a Ferris wheel of business cards. They were efficient at organizing the clutter of your contacts physically, but by today’s standards, look dated and limited in their capacity.
Today we live in the information age. We can easily capture thousands of contacts and access them with just a few swipes and taps on our phone. Thus, the question of contact organization has now become a digital one: which app is best for storing and organizing contacts?
CamCard
As the name suggests, CamCard makes it simple to snap a photo of your business card and digitize them. The app automatically orients the image, transcribes it into your contact list, and exports the information to your email, contact list, or social media. CamCard is excellent at reading words and numbers but fall short in categorizing information to the right places. You may have to manually edit a person’s company name into the right field, for example.
CamCard is available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. There’s a version with ads and limited card slots, and a premium version that ranges between $10 and $20.
ABBYY Business Card Reader
ABBYY Business Card Reader is billed as the “world’s fastest business card scanner and contact management app”, and has even been recommended by The New York Times, CNN, The Telegraph, Computer Business Review, and Macworld. ABBYY works like a breeze, even auto filling missing text and offering automatic or manual backups. It’s also more extensive some of its digital Rolodex counterparts, with support for Apple Watch, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MS Excel exports.
The free version comes with ads and offers 10 card recognitions. Premium offers unlimited card storage, auto backups, and ad-free support for either $8 each month or $30 per year.
Evernote Scannable
Perhaps you are looking for an app that will not only store your business cards but also your receipts, contracts, or other business documents. Evernote Scannable is the solution you’ve been looking for. With a clean and sleek interface, Scannable acts more like a secondary camera app, except documents ready to be scanned turn blue. All images are auto-oriented, cropped, and adjusted for readability, and are easily exported into PDF or JPG, and sent via email or text.
Best of all, Evernote Scannable is totally free to download and use, without limitations.
ScanBizCards
Despite the odd name, ScanBizCards is actually one of the more powerful options on this list. In addition to the same scanning abilities offered in the other apps, ScanBizCards also allows you to export your cards into the CRM platform of your choice, including Salesforce and SugarCRM. For those worried about transcription issues, ScanBizCards even offers manual transcriptions, with 2 complimentary included and then 50 transcription credits for $10. The app has received praise from Apple Gazette, TechCrunch, and the Appy Awards on ABC TV.
ScanBizCards has only one flat price: $2.99, and comes with no subscriptions or limits (except for the aforementioned transcription credits).
SamCard
If you want something that does away with all the cloud technology and fancy graphics, SamCard is your best bet. SamCard doesn’t have any fancy features or flashy interface but instead opts for a simple UI and imports information directly to your phone’s local contact list. Some power users may fear that the app is too barebones compared to the others mentioned on this list, but if you want to capture the simplicity and ease of the Rolodex, SamCard is all you need.
SamCard has a free lite version and a $4 premium version.
WorldCard Mobile
Perhaps you work with several international clients and want to support a variety of languages. WorldCard Mobile has the best language support out of all the apps. With 21 languages available, from Chinese to Arabic, you can format names that don’t translate easily to Roman English. For Gmail users, there’s the added benefit of being able to sync to your Gmail and Google contacts. One caveat is that it does not have the auto-snap feature when the card is in the right position. This may not be a dealbreaker for some, but definitely noticeable for others.
WorldCard Mobile is available in a free lite version and a $7 premium version.
These are just a few of the most popular card scanning apps, but there are many more on the market that serve different niche needs. Regardless of which app you choose, you can look forward to speeding up your contact information organization and ditching (or avoiding) that ancient contraption called a Rolodex.
Which one is your favorite? Have an app in mind that we missed? Get in touch with us through our Twitter (@NovelCoworking) and Facebook. Check back each week for more tips on how you can increase productivity and more!