What is the best app to scan and analyze a PDF floor plan?
"Which app to scan a plan?" is a trick question: depending on your goal, the answer changes completely. Let us clarify the three needs.
Need 1: digitize paper
If your plan is on paper and you just want a clean PDF, a mobile document scanner like Adobe Scan is ideal: crop, deskew, text OCR. But it stops there — it measures nothing.
Need 2: scan a real room
If you are on site with no plan, a mobile app like magicplan rebuilds a plan by measuring the room (camera/LiDAR). That is a field survey, not document analysis: you must be physically there.
Need 3: analyze an existing PDF plan
If you already have a plan (PDF or image) and want surfaces, opening counts and a takeoff, that is FloorScan's job: automatic wall/room detection, auto-scale, DXF/Excel/PDF export. No need to be on site or to redraw.
Decision table
Paper plan to digitize → Adobe Scan. Real room to survey on site → magicplan. PDF/image plan to analyze and take off → FloorScan. Many workflows combine all three: scan first, then analyze.
What about free?
Adobe Scan is free to digitize. For plan analysis, FloorScan offers a free trial to test import, detection and export before moving to a paid plan. That is enough to check the result on your own plans.
There is no single "best app", but the right tool for each need. To digitize: Adobe Scan. To survey a room: magicplan. To analyze a PDF plan and take off: FloorScan.