An offline business card scanner: what "offline" should actually mean

What "offline" really means

A business card scanner can be called offline and still ask you to sign in, sync cards to a server, or ship analytics and ad code. For a card holding someone else's name, number and email, those details matter. Here is what Pianke does instead:

• No account. There is nothing to sign up for.
• No cloud, no server. Your business cards stay on your phone.
• No networking code. The app ships with no backend, no analytics or ad SDK and no tracking.
• On-device OCR. Scanning, text recognition and field parsing all run on your phone, using offline rules.

If you want to check any card app yourself, this guide shows how to verify an app's network behavior on Android and iPhone.

Who it is for

• Sales and business development. Cards from client visits go into a library you can browse by thumbnail, name or company, with keyword search, company grouping and tag filters.
• Trade show and event attendees. Come back with a stack of cards and turn them into a report (see below).
• Anyone who handles other people's contact data and does not want client contact data uploaded to a cloud service.

It is built for people who exchange cards across Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and English-speaking business contexts.

How it works

1. Scan. Capture the card with the built-in document scanner. Edges are detected and perspective is corrected automatically. If the card carries a contact QR, Pianke reads it and merges it into the parsed result.
2. Review the fields. Pianke recognises Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), English, Japanese and Korean, then parses name, company, title, phone, email, address, website and notes. Fix any field, add or remove extra phones, emails and addresses, or tap text on the card image to fill the matching field. Low-confidence fields are flagged for a second look.
3. Save. Scanned someone twice? Merge into the existing card in one tap: duplicate phones and emails are dropped, tags and notes are combined, and the existing photo is kept.
4. Build a Card Report. Back from a trip, a trade show or a round of client visits, tick the cards you collected. Pianke builds an A4 PDF report with each card's photo and contact details and the companies you met listed on the cover. A CSV comes with it for a spreadsheet or CRM. Group by scan date or by company, and preview the report in the app before you share it. It is generated entirely on your phone.
5. Export. Export vCard or CSV, write to your Contacts, or export card images as PDF or JPEG.

You can also attach a meeting note and a local reminder to a card so the follow-up does not slip, and build your own My Card QR that anyone can scan with any camera and save you as a contact, with no need to install Pianke.

Free and Pro

The free tier already covers offline OCR, editing, search, export (vCard, CSV and PDF), duplicate merge, My Card QR, App Lock and backup. Pro is a one-time purchase: no subscription, no ads, no tracking.

Backup and security

JSON backup and import (an import merges with the cards you have and never overwrites them), plus an encrypted .piankevault local backup. Encryption happens on the device and the key never leaves it. App Lock uses Face ID, Touch ID or your device passcode.