BoardSnap vs Microsoft Lens — image capture vs AI comprehension.
Short answer
Microsoft Lens is a document scanning app that captures and straightens whiteboard images for storage in OneDrive or OneNote. BoardSnap goes further: it reads the whiteboard content and returns a written summary plus tri-state action items in about ten seconds. Lens gives you a better image; BoardSnap gives you the content extracted from the image.
Microsoft Lens is a competent, free scanning tool. It straightens whiteboard images, sends them to OneDrive, OneNote, or SharePoint, and even runs basic OCR to make the text searchable. For users who want a clean archive of whiteboard photos inside Microsoft 365, it's a solid choice.
But Lens stops at the image. It doesn't understand what's on the board — it doesn't know that the three columns are a retro format, that the arrows indicate dependencies, that the circled item with a star is a priority decision. It produces a better picture, not a comprehension of the picture.
BoardSnap reads the board. The VisionKit perspective correction is comparable in quality to Lens. What's different is what happens after the correction: BoardSnap AI analyzes the content — diagrams, arrows, lists, annotations — and returns a structured summary with action items organized by status (open / in-progress / done).
When Microsoft Lens wins: Teams fully committed to Microsoft 365 who want their whiteboard images searchable inside OneNote or indexed in SharePoint. If the use case is archiving and the team never needs action items extracted, Lens does the job for free.
When BoardSnap wins: When the goal is to extract the meeting's action items, summarize the discussion, and produce a portable work artifact — not just a clean photo. BoardSnap is for people who need to ship the board's output, not just store it.
For the full comparison, see the BoardSnap vs Microsoft Lens page.
Frequently asked
Does BoardSnap also save a clean image of the whiteboard?
Yes. BoardSnap stores the corrected whiteboard image alongside the AI summary. You get both the visual artifact and the extracted content — not one or the other.
See it work in ten seconds.
BoardSnap is free on the App Store. Snap a board — get a summary and action plan.