ThinkAloud Notes vs ScanLingua Photo Translator
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
ThinkAloud Notes
Record your thoughts and let on-device AI transform them into structured notes with titles, tags, and links. Your data stays private on your phone, with no accounts or subscriptions required. Access and manage your notes as standard Markdown files.
- Voice, photo, and text input
- On-device AI note generation
- Automatic tagging and linking
- Ask questions about your notes
- Knowledge graph creation
- Markdown file export
- Optional cloud sync
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You think out loud. ThinkAloud writes it down. Hit record and just talk: a passing idea, a meeting, a whole lecture. When you stop, you can play the recording back and decide whether it's worth keeping before anything happens to it. Only then does the on-device AI turn it into a real note, with a title, some structure, tags, and links to the related notes you already have. Here's the part that matters. All of this happens on your phone. ThinkAloud runs Google's Gemma model locally, so your voice and your notes never get uploaded anywhere. There's no account to create, no server in the middle, and nothing to pay every month. You download the model once, and after that it works offline. Your notes are just Markdown files in an ordinary folder, the same format Obsidian uses. Point ThinkAloud at a vault you already have, or let it keep one for you. Either way you can open, edit, or back them up with any app you like. Nothing is trapped inside. What it's good at: - Voice, photos, or quick text go in; clean, tagged notes come out - Ask your notes a question in plain language and get an answer with its sources listed, so you can tap straight through to where each fact came from - A knowledge graph that builds itself as your notes start linking up - Full-text search, tags, folders, and checklists - Optional sync to your own Google Drive or iCloud. Your account, a private folder, no servers of mine in between. No ads, no analytics, no tracking, no accounts. I made ThinkAloud because I wanted a notebook that was actually mine. That's the whole idea. The on-device model needs around 3 GB of free space and a fairly recent device.
ScanLingua Photo Translator
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Scan paper documents, extract editable OCR text, translate on device, and export clean TXT or PDF files without an account or watermark. Documents are kept in the app's local storage and are not used for server-side processing by ScanLingua. ScanLingua is built for travelers, students, language learners, and anyone who needs a private document scanner with OCR translation. Capture receipts, notices, menus, study notes, manuals, screenshots, or printed pages with the document camera, then turn images into editable text and bilingual reading material on your iPhone. Key features: - Scan single-page or multi-page documents. - Import photos and screenshots for image-to-text OCR. - Recognize text on device with local OCR. - Edit OCR text before translation. - Download offline language pairs for local translation. - Read original text and translation side by side. - Copy original text, translation, or bilingual segments. - Save useful sentences for local search and study. - Export bilingual TXT, bilingual PDF, and image PDF files. - Share exports through the iOS share sheet. - Keep documents local by default. Why ScanLingua: Many scanner apps focus on cloud storage or subscriptions. ScanLingua focuses on a free local workflow: scan, OCR, translate, edit, export, and share without requiring an account. Your documents stay in the app container unless you choose to share an export with another app. Privacy: Scanned images, OCR text, translations, saved sentences, and exports stay on your device for the core workflow. ScanLingua does not use document content for server-side processing.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: ScanLingua Photo Translator at weekly against ThinkAloud Notes's every 2 weeks. ThinkAloud Notes's advantage is iOS requirement (16.0 vs 18.0). On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
ThinkAloud Notes ships an update every 2 weeks, ScanLingua Photo Translator weekly. The most recent releases landed on October 24, 2026 and October 22, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | ThinkAloud Notes | ScanLingua Photo Translator |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (2 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 2 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 2 weeks | Weekly — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 16.0 — better | 18.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 108 MB | 9 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Ghanashyam Vinod Tatti | 辉全 钟 |
In-app purchases
ThinkAloud Notes
No in-app purchases
ScanLingua Photo Translator
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is ThinkAloud Notes free?
Is ScanLingua Photo Translator free?
Do ThinkAloud Notes or ScanLingua Photo Translator have ads?
Which is updated more often, ThinkAloud Notes or ScanLingua Photo Translator?
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