Microsoft Lens is genuinely excellent at one thing: turning a crooked whiteboard photo into a clean, straight image. BoardSnap starts where Lens stops — reading what's on the board and turning it into an action plan.
Pick Microsoft Lens if you need a best-in-class document scanner that feeds into OneNote or OneDrive. Pick BoardSnap if the scan is step one — and you actually need the board's content extracted and actioned.
| Capability | BoardSnap | Microsoft Lens |
|---|---|---|
| Whiteboard perspective auto-correct | VisionKit | VisionKit |
| Reads diagrams and arrows | Yes, natively | OCR text only |
| AI summary in seconds | ✓ Yes | — No |
| Tri-state action items | ✓ Yes | — No |
| Subtask auto-generation | ✓ Yes | — No |
| Brand-aware tone | ✓ Yes | — No |
| Project-scoped chat | ✓ Yes | — No |
| Saves to Microsoft 365 | — No | ✓ Yes |
| Business card scanning | — No | ✓ Yes |
| Multi-page document scan | — No | ✓ Yes |
| Android support | — No | ✓ Yes |
| Free tier | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
You need the board's content — the decisions, the tasks, the architecture — extracted and turned into something you can act on today. Snap, get a summary, and walk out with an action plan. BoardSnap is the right tool when the scan is just the beginning.
You need to scan a document, business card, or whiteboard and route the result into OneNote, OneDrive, or a PDF. Microsoft Lens is the right tool when the destination is a file or a notebook page, not an action plan.
The board has boxes, arrows, and labels — a system diagram. BoardSnap reads the structure, identifies the components, and generates a summary with the decisions captured. Lens gives you a clean image file. Clean, but silent.
Microsoft Lens routes a multi-page document straight to OneDrive or Word as a PDF. For document capture that lives in the Microsoft ecosystem, Lens is the cleaner pipeline. BoardSnap isn't a document scanner.
You just filled three boards with the client's product strategy. BoardSnap snaps each one and generates on-brand summaries ready to send. Lens would give the client a straight image — BoardSnap gives them a deliverable.
No. Microsoft Lens does excellent optical straightening and OCR, which makes text searchable when the image lands in OneNote. But it doesn't generate a summary, identify action items, or interpret diagrams. That analysis step requires a separate tool.
Not natively. BoardSnap's output lives inside the BoardSnap app, organized by project. You can copy a summary and paste it anywhere, but there's no direct OneDrive integration. If your workflow ends in Microsoft 365, Lens is the better capture tool.
BoardSnap is iOS-only — iPhone and iPad. Microsoft Lens is available on both iOS and Android. If your team is mixed iOS and Android, Lens covers more devices.
Both use on-device OCR for text recognition. BoardSnap adds an AI layer on top that interprets the handwriting in context — understanding that 'ship by Friday' is an action item, not just a string of words. Lens captures the text; BoardSnap understands it.
Free to start. The first snap takes ten seconds — see how it compares to Microsoft Lens.