Air-gapped QR code transfer: free tools or Bouraq?

Free, open-source optical tools are faster than Bouraq, and for a person on their own machine they may be all you need. Here is the honest difference.

See the price and start Watch the proof

€79 / monthbilled yearly (€948), or €99 monthly; 14-day money-back guarantee
≈ 5 kB/s5 MB of logs ≈ 2 min 23 s per loop on a full-HD screen (estimate yours)
Nothing to installone HTML file on the offline PC, and a camera you are allowed to use

What the free tools do well

Projects such as libcimbar stream a file as animated codes that a phone decodes: its README states about 106 KB/s, for files up to 33 MB after compression, with no install. That is some twenty times faster than Bouraq. Tools such as qrcp use a QR code only to open a link over your Wi-Fi network, so they need the network an isolated PC does not have.

What an organisation needs that they do not offer

	Free optical tool	Bouraq
Speed	Faster	About 5 kB/s
Content encrypted	Usually not	Account key on every code
Where the file lands	On the phone	In your space, rebuilt and checked by sha256
Record for security	None	Named account, time stamp, tamper-evident audit trail
Approval, export-only policy	No	Organisation instance options
Way back	No	Private repository or USB key
Someone to sign a contract and an invoice	No	Yes, with a 14-day money-back guarantee

Use the free tool when

You own the machine and the data, speed matters most, and nobody needs a record. That is a perfectly good choice.

Use Bouraq when

The machine or the data belongs to your employer or your client, someone will ask what left and when, or you need changes to come back. Bouraq is slower on purpose: six large codes per page, drawn to be read reliably by an ordinary phone at arm's length.

Honest scope. Bouraq needs a camera allowed at the workstation and suits kilobytes to a few megabytes. It is not built to win speed records. Security and architecture →

Questions

Why pay when free tools are faster?

You pay for what surrounds the transfer: the encryption key tied to your account, the verified inbox, the audit trail, the approval options, the way back, support and an invoice. If you need none of these, use the free tool.

Can someone read my codes from a photo of the screen?

Not with Bouraq: every code is encrypted with your account key. With a plain QR tool, anyone who photographs the screen can decode the content.

When someone will ask what left and when.

See the price and start Security page for approvers

14-day money-back guarantee · €79 a month billed yearly, or €99 monthly.