Tabscanner vs BlinkReceipt: Which Is Better? – 2024 Guide

Choosing the right receipt scanner API for your business is critical. Whether you’re in charge of managing business finances or want to find a seamless solution to gathering and organizing the mountain of expense receipts you receive every month whilst in lockdown, a receipt scanner is a necessity.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of options to choose from. Depending on which receipt scanner you choose, you can access scalable services, take advantage of loyalty and rewards programs, even gain valuable consumer purchasing insight. The only question you need to answer is which is the right one for your business?

Now, rather than list the attributes and shortcomings of every mobile receipt scanning app on the market today, we’ve decided to look at the contrast between two – Tabscanner and BlinkReceipt. Both are well-established in the sector and deliver lauded levels of performance.

But which is better? Let’s find out.

Reasons to Choose the Tabscanner Receipt OCR API

Let’s get this out of the way now, choose Tabscanner and you’ll get the best receipt scanner API available today. Years of development honing functionality and global usability, Tabscanner features the world’s most accurate receipt OCR API.

Having successfully extracted more than 100,000,000 receipts worldwide, Tabscanner has a lightning-fast cloud API that can process all POS data fields in under 2 seconds. Not only that, but the API also features multi-language support meaning that it can extract accurate data from any language or character set in the world.

What else? Well, through intelligent data capture, Tabscanner has an API that can understand receipt fields at human levels of intelligence. What does this mean? It achieves 98% core accuracy on core data – totals, establishments, and dates.

Through an intuitive AI-driven API, the receipt scanner OCR provides line-by-line data extraction – on any POS receipt in the world. This includes any global language and character set. Whether you make a purchase in Toronto or Tokyo, the USA, or UAE, rest assured that Tabscanner’s API will recognize and extract core data perfectly.

What’s more, the OCR API can be integrated into a wealth of devices. Whether you want to manage commercial expenses remotely with an iPhone or tablet or prefer working in an office environment, Tabscanner’s flexible capabilities make managing your finances a breeze.

Reasons Not to Choose Tabscanner

Having used the receipt OCR API itself successfully we can testify to its performance, however, in the interests of being fully impartial and transparent, there are a few things that you should be aware of being immediately putting your hand in your pocket.

As everyone knows, technology evolves at a rapid rate. Innovation can quickly give way to obsolescence. Whereas this is hardly an issue for Tabscanner right now, who knows how much more accurate OCR will be in two, three, or four years.

Now, we know that in terms of being a ‘con’ this is a bit of a stretch – and if history is anything to go by, Tabscanner is likely to continue to utilize the skills of digital engineers to evolve their level of service – but it’s worth mentioning.

Could you consider their set costs a ‘con?’ Well, yes. Sort of. If you’re angling to find one. Some other receipt scanner OCR products offer a single scalable cost. Tabscanner has three different packages – Basic, Pro, and Enterprise which offer various levels of functionality.

Tabscanner’s package costs are honest and transparent, allowing users to choose the package that’s right for their business. However, there’s isn’t a cost per user. Is this a con? Sort of. But, again, it’s a bit of a stretch.
As far as cons go, that’s really it.

Reasons to Choose BlinkReceipt

There are undoubtedly several reasons to choose BlinkReceipt. For starters, there are several use cases that drive decision-making for those favoring this receipt scanner API.

You can build brand loyalty by verifying purchases and immediately rewards users through purchase validation and gather consumer purchase data for insights and trigger real-time surveys for brands and retailers. There’s also line-item extraction which recognizes and processes core information like retailers, products purchased, dates, times, and totals.

Like Tabscanner, BlinkReceipt says that they have successfully processed over 100,000,000 receipts worldwide, although they don’t offer any insights into the speed of their API or if their receipt scanner OCR can recognize different languages and character sets.

BlinkReceipt also claims to be able to feature OCR technology that recognizes receipt information at human levels of intelligence, although they don’t publish percentage accuracy on their website.

Reasons Not to Choose BlinkReceipt

In our research, we immediately noticed something about BlinkReceipt – they offer more than merely a receipt scanner API. Now, whereas this isn’t automatically a con, ID recognition is different from receipt recognition which leads us to think that, perhaps, they don’t specialize in receipt recognition and extraction and therefore may not be as adept as Tabscanner.

Additionally, BlinkReceipt isn’t forthcoming about the percentage accuracy of the extract data from scanned receipts. This could be a marketing decision taken on their part, but we would have liked to see percentages mentioned, after all, there’s a big difference between extracting core data to 98% accuracy and 90% accuracy.

There’s another glaring difference when you compare Tabscanner and BlinkReceipt – the partnerships. Tabscanner has partnered with several blue-chip brands, including Blue Prism, ATB Financial, Chevron, and Fijitsu. BlinkReceipt doesn’t appear to have any – at least there aren’t any that they’ve published on their website.

Then there’s the fact that BlinkReceipt isn’t necessarily limited to providing receipt scanner OCR. Now, this can be interpreted in one of two ways. Either they don’t specialize in receipts or they want their products to be diverse. Either way, when choosing an OCR API, you’re better off going with a business that specializes in its product offering, right?

Tabscanner vs BlinkReceipt: Which Is Better?

If you asked us to decide which receipt OCR API is better right now, we’d have to go with Tabscanner.
Although BlinkReceipt does have some useful functions and claims to offer (almost) the same level of service, the fact remains that from our research, Tabscanner has the evidence to back up its claims.
And, in the end, evidence is far more effective than claims.