Sansan and Eight in English? Options for Non-Japanese Speakers

Updated 2026-09-03 · meishiscan team

Ask any Japanese colleague how they manage business cards and you will hear two names: Sansan, the enterprise standard, and Eight, its free consumer sibling. Both are excellent products. Both are also built, priced and supported for the Japanese market — which leaves foreign professionals and mixed-language teams in an awkward gap.

The incumbents, honestly

Product	Model	For English speakers
Eight	Free; Premium ~¥600/mo; human-verified OCR; doubles as a networking platform	Interface is Japanese-first with partial English; extracted data is optimised for Japanese fields; your cards join Sansan's data network
Eight Team	From ¥15,000/mo base + per-user fees beyond 10	The SME offer, but a 3-person team still pays the full base; same language caveats
Sansan	Enterprise, quote-only — commonly cited around ¥50,000+/mo with setup fees	Powerful (org charts, CRM sync) and genuinely used by multinationals — at enterprise procurement scale
myBridge (LINE)	Completely free, operator-verified	Japanese interface; individual-oriented

None of these is a bad product. The mismatch is structural: they treat English as the edge case, exactly as Western scanners treat Japanese as the edge case.

What bilingual teams actually need

An interface both halves of the team can use — the expat manager and the Japanese assistant;
Contacts stored bilingually: kanji, furigana and romaji as parallel fields, so the same person is findable and addressable in either language;
Team pricing that doesn't have a ¥15,000/month floor for a three-person office;
Data that stays private — several incumbents monetise the contact graph; client-confidential businesses can't accept that;
Standard exports (vCard, CSV, Excel) so nothing is locked in.

This is the gap meishiscan was built for. meishiscan reads Japanese and English cards into clean bilingual contacts in seconds — kanji, furigana and romaji side by side. The free plan (20 scans/month, no card required) is enough to clear most piles.

Switching is easier than it looks

If you already have data in Eight, the Premium plan can export your cards as CSV — import that into whichever tool you move to, and your history comes with you. (A tool without CSV import is telling you something about its export philosophy, too.)