html5-qrcode VS quagga2

I've been working on a web application that has a bar code code scanning component and I will say that while the apparent performance of this library is impressive, I am not a fan of this pricing model, and that alone pushes me to use alternative libraries [1]. As an aside, the library I'm thinking has zero issues with scanning any of the examples in your OSS comparison [2] using the demo implementation [3] (it scans bar codes despite the name being "html5-qrcode").

For a library like this, the only really appealing pricing model is a flat fee that buys unlimited use of the version I buy in perpetuity (even if that fee is several thousand dollars). I'm not, however, going to pay monthly forever for code that (1) you wrote once and is now static, (2) that you aren't hosting, and (3) that I need to integrate into my application myself. If I need support I will happily pay you a support fee. Moreover, I cannot take on the liability of my app's bar code scanner ceasing working because you decide to close your doors and then the license won't reactivate.

[1]: https://github.com/mebjas/html5-qrcode

I recently spent quite a while researching different js barcode scanning libraries for work, so I’ll share my experience. The best free library I found was html5-qrcode. It uses zxing under the hood and it’s pretty adequate for most use cases. For any personal project it’s probably the best you’re gonna get. Like you, we found that it had trouble when barcodes were obscured, and since ours were really long code128 barcodes, it really struggled with those. Unfortunately this meant we had to pivot to one of the paid options. Dynamsoft, Scanbot, and Scandit all seem to do a really good job of picking up barcodes, so for professional use any of those 3 will probably meet your needs. From my experience Scandit seemed the best at picking up tough to read codes, so that’s the option we went with. Hopefully this is enough to get you started!

https://github.com/mebjas/html5-qrcode is the repository for it

I've used this guy previously: https://github.com/mebjas/html5-qrcode

html5-qrcode

The next level up from that would be to hook up the business-specific frontend to a barcode scanner and at that point not only could both clients & business know what items are available, but also their current stock & availability.

quokka2

I used the zebra crossing app ("barcode scanner") in mass scan mode to scan all my books. The app keeps a history of scanned items and you can export it as CSV. This of course is not very "nice" but a very fast way to scan all your books. There is also some JS implementation for isbn scanning which works ok. It is used by bookwyrm which is open-source (but not free software).

Honorable mention to quagga. No longer actively maintained, but there is an active fork quagga2.

The component used for the camera barcode scanner is quagga2, feel free to improve it or even replace it with another one and provide a pull request if that maybe works better. Also already partly tracked in #737.

The camera barcode scanner component used is quagga2. Scanning highly depends on lighting, the angle and so on and is IMHO generally slow and error prone. I would only use a laser scanner which is 1000 % faster and works under any lighting condition. On my phone I personally simply use the dropdown / search way, since still faster than a single camera barcode scan...

The component used is Quagga2 and there are also some options in data/config.php to tweak it.