Top 5 Free Plant Scanner Apps With Expert Plant Care Tips

Becoming a plant expert may look like a daunting task but this was the case only a few years ago. Now with the integration of machine learning and AI, we have the power of plant scanner apps and plant health apps that can benefit many gardeners and plant lovers in many ways.

A plant scanner or plant health app can provide many features to the users such as an extensive plant database for better recognition, plant care tips, and plant expert guide. These features can be useful to both beginners and professionals.

It is important to have a good knowledge of plant health and what’s better than advice from a plant expert? Good plant health leads to a healthy and thriving garden, with a plant identification app you can have a healthy indoor or outdoor garden with ease and fun learning.

The Power of Plant Scanner Apps

A plant scanner app can offer tons of features and tools that can help you in various gardening and plant care activities. It can identify any plant and also provide additional information about the same.

What is a Plant Scanner App?

A plant scanner basically helps users identify any plant that they may have encountered anywhere with real-time results. It uses photo-recognition software that focuses on key details such as- leaf shape, plant size, flower color, etc. to get a match from the plant database. Then it shows the result to the user that is the perfect match of the image.

With the advancement of technology and the application use of AI, many plant scanners and plant health apps can identify a vast variety of plants and plant diseases. With each scan or plant identification, the AI of the app learns and grows. It also learns from the user’s feedback to provide better and quick results in the future.

Benefits of Using a Plant Scanner App

Instant Plant Identification

A plant scanner or plant health app can provide instant and reliable plant identification of various plant species. The app can analyze many distinct features of the plant using photo-recognition software and provide the best possible match that can help users identify any unfamiliar plant in their garden.

Access to Expert Advice

Many plant apps provide reliable information about various plant health and care tips including disease care and daily requirements. This type of information can guide many beginners to grow a lush garden full of healthy plants. Some apps also provide an option to connect to a plant expert that can help with any query that the app is unable to answer.

Monitor Plant Health

Comprehensive Plant Database

With its vast plant database of many species in the world, a plant scanner app can quickly identify any plant and provide trustworthy information on plants. These apps can have a database about various shrubs, cacti, trees, food crops, and aquatic and wild plants. Users can learn common and scientific names of various plants along with their care and plant health tips.

Top 5 Plant Scanner Apps

Plantora is the most elite choice out of all the plant scanners and health apps. This app offers a complete package of features such as a plant health check, disease diagnosis, symptom checker, plant care guide, and personalized reminders. The guide section of this app provides encyclopedic information on various plant needs and maintenance. The app is free-to-use and provides unlimited snaps and the identification works flawlessly with an extensive plant database.

This plant scanner app also provides various calculators to monitor the needs of your plants such as water calculator, lux meter, soil calculator, pot-size calculator and much more.

Pros:

• The app is completely free-to-use and offers unlimited daily scans.
• Plantora has a vast database and offers many features.
• The app features a clean and ad-free UI.

Cons:

• Some features of the app are still under development so some users might face a lag.

Rating:

This app is perfect if you are looking for a tool that can help you identify trees. The vast plant database can identify over 90% of all known species of plants and trees. The app also doubles as a reminder app and you can track any tasks related to plant care and maintenance. Leaf snap is known for its precise plant identifications and is therefore liked by many users.

Pros:

• This plant scanner app has a vast database of over 90% of all known plant species.
• It has a very simple and clean UI.
• The app provides above-average accuracy in most cases.

Cons:

• The app features way too many ads which forces users to buy the premium version.
• Leafsnap is a great app to identify trees but it sometimes fails to identify other plants.
• The app sources information from Wikipedia which makes it unreliable.

Rating:

Google Lens is another scanner app that is not a dedicated plant scanner. Due to Google’s humungous database, this app is able to recognize various plants. Even though this is not a plant scanner app Google Lens can still provide reliable results. Additionally, each plant scan strengthens the AI and makes it more reliable, quick, and a plant expert.

Google Lens is the most simple app to scan flowers and get exact or similar results.

Pros:

• The app is free-to-use.
• It provides a dedicated Wikipedia page for each plant.
• Google Lens is perfect for casual plant scans.

Cons:

• For IOS there is no separate app.
• This is not an accurate or reliable app as it is not designed for just identifying plants
• It doesn’t provide more plant care features like other apps.

Rating:

This app claims to accurately recognize over 600,000 different types of plants. Under a special initiative, this app plants one tree for each download and registered user. Other than this the app is very useful and provides various features that can help in plant identification and plant care.

With Plant Snap, you can join various plant communities of over 50 million users across 200 countries.

Pros:

• A very accurate app with a smooth UI.
• The app has a special integration with Snapchat that allows users to scan any plant using Snapchat’s camera.

Cons:

• There are only 5 free plant scans daily.
• The app has a vast database but still isn’t comparable to expert knowledge.

Rating:

This is one of the most popular plant apps. This app has over 10 million downloads and is able to recognize 20,000 species of plants. The plant database of this app might be comparatively low but the accuracy of plant identification is certainly worth mentioning. The plant database of this app specializes in wild plants and can make anyone a wild plant expert.

Pros:

• The information on this app is crowdsourced and allows users to contribute.
• This app is suited for worldwide plant identification.

Cons:

• The crowdsourced data questions the reliability of the app.
• You need a good connection to upload and download images on this app.
• The users need to sign up to use most of the features.

Rating:

To know more about top plant identification apps you can check out this article.

Tips for maximizing your Plant Scanner App experience

Take well-lit and clear photos

Many apps can fail to recognize a plant even if it is in their plant database due to faulty images. It is suggested to take a number of clear photos under bright lighting to help the app recognize the image and provide a reliable result. Try to use different angles and close-up shots capturing important parts of the plants such as leaves, stems, flowers, fruits, or any other distinctive feature. Identifying various parts of a plant also makes you a plant expert.

Keep Track of Your Plant Collection

Plant scanner apps offer features like plant tracking through which users can track the health of their plants. Users can create personalized schedules and reminders that buzz them about various plant needs such as watering, pruning, humidity, and repotting. This enables users to take regular and better care of their plants and ensures healthy growth.

Read: How To Water Plants?

Utilize Expert Advice

Every plant app provides extensive knowledge and most of them provide an option to get in touch with a plant expert who can further assist users to answer any questions. This feature is very useful for beginners who have trouble understanding the application.

Explore The Plant Database

With the enormous plant database of these apps, users can identify many plant species and get their information. Anyone can access these plant databases by simply identifying a plant through the app. Even if the result is inaccurate a user can provide valuable feedback which further enhances the database and the functionality of the app.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Accurate Are The Plant Scanner Apps?

Many plant scanner apps have different claims about their accuracy. But overall most of these apps are pretty accurate and can easily identify many plant species, especially the local species of different regions. The accuracy can be affected by picture qualities or poor connection so make sure you have these things in check while identifying plants.

Can Plant Scanner Apps diagnose plant diseases?

Yes, most plant scanner apps provide a feature to diagnose any plant problem or disease that your plant might be suffering from. You can identify visible diseases by simply scanning them while hidden diseases can be identified by providing any symptoms that you have noticed in your plants.

Are Plant Scanner Apps Suitable for Beginners?

Certainly, all plant apps are made to guide beginners in gardening and plant cultivation. These apps use simple language and provide extensive details in an attempt to answer any query that the user might app. Also, these apps save the users time by eradicating the effort of research.

How often are Plant Databases updated?

While new species are added regularly in every plant database, they also get updated with each scan as it helps them to enhance their learning and algorithms. Each identified plant helps the AI to grow and provide better results. A user should regularly update the app and provide valuable feedback on each result for better identification in the future.