Adobe Scan vs. CamScanner
Adobe Scan is published by Adobe Inc. and has been on the App Store since 2017-05-31. CamScanner is published by INTSIG Information Co., Ltd and has been available since 2010-08-28. Both are free to download, both come from companies large enough to run a real support site, and neither one publishes a price on the page a scanner user would think to check. The question that separates them is not what they cost but what shape the cost takes — which account you need, which subscription the extras belong to, and what each free tier is documented to withhold. This comparison is built from what each developer publishes, with every claim sourced and anything unverifiable listed as such.
Everything below comes from published sources, checked on 2026-08-26 and linked in each section. Where the sources don’t answer a question, it’s listed under What we couldn’t verify rather than guessed at.
Adobe Scan
A free scanner that feeds Adobe’s PDF ecosystem, where the paid capabilities belong to an Acrobat subscription rather than to the scanner itself.
CamScanner
A long-established free scanner with its own membership tiers, published on the developer’s site as detailed feature lists with no figure attached to any of them.
Neither company answers the price question where a scanner user would ask it. What separates them is where the answer lives instead — for one it sits on a different product’s pricing page, and for the other it appears only on the purchase sheet.
At a glance
| Field | Adobe Scan | CamScanner |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Adobe Inc. | INTSIG Information Co., Ltd |
| Price | Free to download; Adobe publishes no price for Adobe Scan. The App Store in-app-purchase list shows Adobe Scan Premium items from $3.99 to $69.99 and Adobe Scan Plus at $4.99/month or $19.99/year, read on 2026-08-26 | Free to download; INTSIG publishes no prices. The App Store in-app-purchase list shows Premium Account at $9.99/month and $59.99/year, and CamScanner Premium items at $6.99, $49.99 and $69.99, read on 2026-08-26 |
| App Store rating | 4.88 from 1,585,704 ratings | 4.85 from 1,885,440 ratings |
| Current version | 26.08.12, updated 2026-08-12 | 7.25.0, updated 2026-08-31 |
| First released | 2017-05-31 | 2010-08-28 |
| Install size | 415.3 MB | 385.0 MB |
| Minimum iOS | 18.0 | 13.0 |
| iPad support | Yes | No |
Pulled from the App Store on 2026-09-04. Prices, versions, ratings, install sizes and OS requirements change — check the current App Store listing before relying on any of these values.
Feature comparison
| Field | Adobe Scan | CamScanner |
|---|---|---|
| Differs: Where prices are published | Not on any Adobe Scan page. Adobe’s scanner page and the Adobe Scan FAQ name no figure. The figures sit on Adobe’s Acrobat pricing page, attached to Acrobat plans rather than to the scanner | Nowhere. INTSIG’s CamScanner page names three account tiers and lists what each includes without attaching a figure to any of them, and camscanner.com’s premium page renders no pricing |
| Differs: What unlocks the paid features | An Acrobat subscription. Adobe’s FAQ states that by subscribing to Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Export PDF, Adobe Acrobat PDF Pack or Adobe Acrobat Pro you can access premium features for advanced PDF handling | A CamScanner membership, sold as a Premium Account on the app’s own tiers |
| Differs: Published free limit | Text recognition is capped at 5 pages — the App Store description offers to increase OCR capacity from 5 to 100 pages. The FAQ gives 5 GB of free Adobe cloud storage | A Standard account gets 200M cloud space and can invite up to 10 people to review and comment, per INTSIG’s account comparison |
| Differs: Account required | An Adobe account. The FAQ frames storage, sync and sharing as what you get with a free sign-up to Adobe cloud storage, the iOS documentation directs users to sign in with existing credentials or sign up for an Adobe account, and the App Store description says scans are automatically saved to Adobe Document Cloud | INTSIG describes all three tiers as accounts, with cloud space and cross-device sync attached to them. Whether an account is required to scan and keep documents locally is not stated |
| What the subscription adds | Combining files, exporting PDFs to other formats, password protection, editing text in scans, text recognition up to 100 pages, PDF compression, high-speed scanning and the Magic eraser, per Adobe’s Adobe Scan for iOS documentation | High-quality scan, editable OCR results exportable as .txt, +10GB cloud space, up to 40 extra collaborators, encrypted document links with expiry dates, automatic upload to six named cloud services, unlimited PDF uploads, OCR translation into 60+ languages and more precise cloud OCR each with 1000 free credits a month, and a 30-day recycle bin |
| Differs: How the purchase list reads | Ten items. Adobe Scan Premium appears at $3.99, $9.99, $29.99, $49.99 and $69.99, alongside a monthly item at $9.99 and a differently capitalised “Scan premium - monthly” at $14.99. Adobe Scan Plus is $4.99/month or $19.99/year. Adobe PDF Pack appears at $9.99, which is a separate Adobe product sold inside the scanner | Ten items under two product names for the same-sounding thing. Premium Account is $9.99/month and $59.99/year, with the month and year variants each listed twice under differing spacing and capitalisation. CamScanner Premium appears at $6.99, $49.99 twice and $69.99. One-page Fax is $0.99 |
| Differs: Billing periods offered | Monthly and yearly items only | The App Store description says subscriptions are billed weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually. The purchase list on that same listing contains only monthly and annual items |
| Differs: Team or business tier | Not offered as a scanner tier. Adobe’s business plans are Acrobat plans and are not addressed on the Adobe Scan pages | INTSIG publishes a Business Version with shared group folders, administrator controls over members’ documents, member management and each member’s storage raised from 200M to 10G. No item corresponding to it appears in the App Store purchase list |
| Differs: Fax | Not offered | Sold as a per-use item, One-page Fax at $0.99, separately from any membership |
| Cloud destinations | Adobe Document Cloud, which scans are saved to automatically, with sharing across desktop, mobile and web | Box, Google Drive, Dropbox and other third-party services on a Standard account; automatic upload to Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, OneDrive and OneNote on a Premium Account |
Sources for this section: Adobe Scan App Store listing, Adobe Scan FAQ, Adobe Scan for iOS, Manage subscriptions, Adobe Acrobat pricing page, CamScanner App Store listing, and INTSIG’s CamScanner account comparison. All six were checked on 2026-08-26. Published feature lists change — check the current pages before relying on any row above. A heavier amber rule marks a row where the two apps meaningfully differ.
Where each one fits
Adobe Scan fits someone who is already inside Adobe’s PDF ecosystem, or expects to be. It needs an Adobe account, and it puts scans into Adobe Document Cloud by default, which is the same storage the free tier gives 5 GB of. The free app is a capable scanner with one clearly published limit — text recognition stops at 5 pages — and the things it will not do are the things a PDF suite does: combining files, converting to other formats, password protection, editing text in a scan. That is the part worth understanding before installing, because those capabilities are not sold as a scanner upgrade. Adobe’s own FAQ says they arrive by subscribing to Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Export PDF, Adobe Acrobat PDF Pack or Adobe Acrobat Pro, and the figures for those live on the Acrobat pricing page, not on any Adobe Scan page: Acrobat Standard at US$14.99/mo and Acrobat Pro at US$19.99/mo on an annual plan billed monthly, US$239.88/yr prepaid for Pro, or US$29.99/mo for Pro month-to-month, with Acrobat Studio above them at US$24.99/mo, US$299.88/yr or US$34.99/mo. Someone who installs the scanner expecting a scanner-sized subscription is looking at a PDF-suite-sized one, and nothing in the app’s own marketing surfaces that.
CamScanner fits someone who wants the scanner and its extras to be one product rather than a doorway into another. Its membership is its own, and INTSIG documents what that membership contains in unusual detail — editable OCR output, ten gigabytes of added cloud space, forty extra collaborators, expiring encrypted links, automatic upload to six named services, translation and cloud OCR with monthly credit allowances, a thirty-day recycle bin. The gap is at the other end. None of it carries a price, on INTSIG’s site or on camscanner.com, and the App Store purchase list that would settle the question is inconsistent with itself: two different product names for what sounds like one membership, the same durations listed twice under differing punctuation, a description promising weekly and quarterly billing that the purchase list does not offer, and a Business Version documented on the developer’s site with no corresponding item to buy. Fax is separate again, priced per page.
Between them, the free tiers are the clearer half of the picture. Adobe publishes a hard number for its free limit and CamScanner publishes a storage figure and a collaborator cap, which is more than either company publishes about what the paid tiers cost. For a pair where one developer publishes a plan table with real figures and the other publishes nothing at all, SwiftScan vs. Genius Scan covers the same category from the opposite end. And what happened to Microsoft Lens records the removal of the free scanner many people were using before this question came up for them.
What we couldn’t verify
These are questions the published sources do not answer. They are listed here unresolved rather than guessed at.
- What a CamScanner Premium Account costs, since neither INTSIG’s site nor camscanner.com publishes a figure for any tier
- Whether CamScanner’s “Premium Account” and “CamScanner Premium” purchase items are the same membership under two names, and what the third and fourth figures cover
- What the CamScanner Business Version costs or how it is bought, given that no item matching it appears in the purchase list
- Whether CamScanner requires an account to scan and store documents on the device alone
- Whether CamScanner applies a watermark to scans made without a membership. INTSIG lists adding annotations and watermarks as something a Standard account can do, and publishes nothing about a watermark being applied automatically either way
- Which Adobe Scan premium features come with which of the four subscriptions Adobe names, since the FAQ lists the subscriptions together without dividing the features between them
- What the Adobe Scan Premium and Adobe Scan Plus purchase items cost relative to an Acrobat plan, and whether buying one inside the app is equivalent to subscribing on Adobe’s site
- Why Adobe Scan Premium appears at five different figures in the purchase list, which nothing published explains
- How either app’s scan quality or text recognition performs in practice, which no published source establishes
Ownership disclosure
AppMatchup is operated by Fogarty Holdings LLC, which publishes its own iOS apps.
Neither app on this page is one of them. Adobe Scan and CamScanner are published by Adobe Inc. and INTSIG Information Co., Ltd respectively, and Fogarty Holdings LLC has no stake in either.
Where a comparison on this site does include an app published by Fogarty Holdings LLC, that fact is labeled on that comparison page itself, next to the app it concerns.