What's the difference between an SDK and an API for document scanning?

An SDK (software development kit) and an API (application programming interface) serve different roles in a document scanning integration, and understanding the difference helps clarify what a business actually needs to build.

An SDK is a bundled package of code, tools, and often pre-built user interface components that a developer installs directly into their own application. For document scanning specifically, an SDK typically includes the camera interface for capturing document images, real-time capture guidance logic (detecting glare, blur, or poor framing), and the extraction and validation processing itself, often running on-device without needing a network call for every operation.

Using an SDK means a developer doesn't need to build the camera capture experience or the underlying extraction logic from scratch. They integrate the vendor's pre-built components into their own app and receive structured results back through defined function calls.

An API, in this context, is a way of communicating with a remote service over the network, typically sending a document image (or already-processed data) to a server and receiving back a structured response, commonly in JSON format. APIs are used when processing happens server-side rather than on-device, or when a business needs to integrate document data into a backend system rather than a user-facing app's own interface.

In practice, many document scanning products offer both: an SDK for the mobile or web front-end experience where users actually scan their documents, and an API for server-side processing or for integrating extracted results into a business's backend systems. Some architectures use the SDK for capture and on-device processing, then call an API separately to pass the final structured data into other business systems, like a CRM or compliance platform.

Which combination a business needs depends on where document capture happens (a business's own app, a web page, a back-office upload) and where the resulting data needs to end up.

ScanDoc offers both SDKs (for iOS, Android, and web-based capture) and API access, giving businesses flexibility to build a front-end capture experience, integrate server-side processing, or both, depending on their specific architecture.