MOJA — Contact Card (MeCard) QR Code Generator

Q: MECARD or vCard?

vCard ( Contact Card (vCard 3.0) ) if you want the widest possible support and more fields. MECARD if the code has to be physically small and the details are short. Both are free here.

Contact Card (MeCard) QR Code Generator

A MECARD QR code saves a contact to a phone, like a vCard but in a much more compact format. It was designed for Japanese feature phones, and that heritage is exactly why it is smaller — and why support is less universal.

First Name

Last Name

Phone

Website

Address

Birthday

Memo / Note

Customize appearance 22 styles

Eye rotation

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Foreground color #000000

Single color QR

Eye frame color #000000

Eye ball color #000000

Background color #ffffff

Transparent background

Background image

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Upload an image to place behind the QR. Keep opacity low so the code stays scannable.

Upload an image to use these controls.

Auto-contrast over background Automatically flips dots and eyes to black or white where they would blend into the background image, keeping the code scannable.

Image scale 100%

Image opacity 100%

Position X 0%

Position Y 0%

Upload logo

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The logo is centered automatically. Use a high error-correction level for larger logos.

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Logo size 22%

Logo margin 1

Error correction

Higher error correction keeps the QR scannable when a logo covers the center.

Quiet zone margin 4

Export size 320px

Fill in the form and click Generate

Generating your QR code…

How to create a Contact Card (MeCard) QR code

Fill in only what you need Every field lengthens the code. MECARD’s advantage over Contact Card (vCard 3.0) is size, and it disappears if you fill in everything.
Put the surname and given name in their own fields The name is stored as "last,first". Keeping them separate is what lets a phone sort and display the contact correctly.
Type punctuation normally Backslash, semicolon, colon and comma are reserved in MECARD and are escaped before encoding, so a company called "Smith, Jones & Co" imports in one piece.
Test the import, not just the scan The only meaningful test is whether a contact appears with the fields in the right places on both an iPhone and an Android phone.

What a Contact Card (MeCard) QR code is for

The payload is a compact record: MECARD:N:Last,First;TEL:…;EMAIL:…;; Fields are separated by semicolons and the whole thing ends with two, and there is no per-line structure — which is where the size saving comes from compared with a vCard, where every property is its own line with its own name.

Smaller matters more than it sounds. A contact code is often printed on a business card, which is the smallest surface anyone prints a QR code on. Fewer characters means fewer modules, larger squares at the same physical size, and a code that still scans after being in a wallet.

The trade is support. Contact Card (vCard 3.0) is the format every phone, every contacts app and every CRM understands. MECARD is understood by most modern scanners but not all, and by fewer desktop tools. If the card matters more than the size, vCard is the safer choice — and it is free here too.

Where a Contact Card (MeCard) QR code earns its place

Business cards where space is tight

The case MECARD is genuinely better at: a small code that still scans reliably from a card in poor light.

Name badges and lanyards

Contact details that save rather than just display, printed small enough not to dominate the badge.

Stickers and small labels

Anywhere the printable area is the constraint and the contact details are short.

Contact Card (MeCard) format notes and limits

Support is good but not universal. Some scanners show the raw MECARD: text instead of offering to save a contact. Contact Card (vCard 3.0) does not have that problem.

It carries less than a vCard. No photo, no structured multi-line address, fewer field types. That is the source of the size advantage rather than an oversight.

Reserved characters are escaped, and a hand-built MECARD usually gets this wrong. A colon or semicolon inside a value truncates the record silently. Generated here it is handled; typed by hand it is the most common defect.

Everything in it is public. A printed contact code can be decoded and harvested in bulk, so use work details rather than home ones.

The address is a single free-text field. Phones display it, but they cannot split out a city or postcode that was never sent separately.

Contact Card (MeCard) QR codes — questions people actually ask

MECARD or vCard?

vCard (Contact Card (vCard 3.0)) if you want the widest possible support and more fields. MECARD if the code has to be physically small and the details are short. Both are free here.

Why is my MECARD code smaller than my vCard one?

Because the format is terser — no per-line property names, no BEGIN/END wrapper. Same information, fewer characters, fewer modules.

What happens to a comma in a company name?

It is escaped before encoding, so the name imports whole. Without that the comma would be read as a separator, because MECARD uses "last,first" for names.

Will every phone offer to save the contact?

Most modern ones will. A few scanners show the raw text instead, which is the one thing vCard reliably avoids.