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Scanly review

Free#38 of 75 in Mobile Scanning Apps

A free open-source Android scanner for private OCR, structured exports, and optional AI workflows.

4.9/10Editor score
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Scanly4.9 Visit Scanly

Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026

Scanly is a free, open-source Android app for scanning documents and barcodes. Its core OCR runs on-device with PaddleOCR and ONNX Runtime, while optional AI scanning handles handwriting, forms, receipts, tables, and complex layouts. It is aimed at Android users who want local processing, editable structured text, and more than a basic image-to-PDF workflow. Barcode and QR scanning adds content-aware actions, and scan results can be exported to PDF, Word, Markdown, CSV, or JSON.

Privacy is a central part of the product’s design. Core features include local scan history and privacy-focused processing, while offline OCR keeps document recognition on the device. AI scans and translation follow a different model: selected content may be sent to the provider chosen by the user. Scanly connects with Gemini, Mistral OCR, OpenRouter, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, Groq, Cerebras, Cloudflare Workers AI, OpenAI, Claude, OpenAI-compatible endpoints, and Open Food Facts. This gives users flexibility in choosing AI services, but it also makes provider selection part of the privacy decision.

The app’s breadth is notable for a free Android tool: translation covers 18 languages, summaries are available in short, medium, and detailed formats, and Markdown results remain editable. At the same time, Scanly is a more specialized choice for OCR, structured extraction, barcode work, and AI-assisted interpretation than for a full document-management workflow. Users who want open-source Android scanning with local OCR should pick it; those seeking an iOS app or a broader capture workflow should choose a different category option.

Scanly pros and cons

  • Where it wins
    • On-device offline OCR uses PaddleOCR and ONNX Runtime
    • Exports structured results to PDF, Word, Markdown, CSV, and JSON
    • Supports barcode actions, translation, summaries, and local scan history
  • Where it doesn't
    • Android-only, with no iOS app
    • AI scanning and translation may send selected content to an external provider
    • A narrower fit for automatic capture, multipage scanning, or searchable PDFs

Scanly fact sheet, pricing and score →

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