QR Code vs Aztec Code
Aztec codes are a 2D barcode format commonly used on airline boarding passes and transit tickets because they don't require a blank white margin around the pattern, which matters on cramped ticket printouts. For general, marketing, and business use, QR codes are the better choice because of near-universal recognizability and native support in every phone's camera app.
Aztec codes use a central square finder pattern, a bullseye at the very center of the grid, rather than the three corner squares a QR code uses. The more important practical difference is that Aztec doesn't require a quiet zone, the blank margin QR codes need around the outside for a scanner to lock onto the pattern reliably. On a boarding pass printed on thermal stock or crammed onto a phone screen next to fare details and seat numbers, that margin-free design lets the code sit right up against surrounding print and still scan correctly.
QR codes need that blank border for the finder patterns to register correctly against the background — the entry on quiet zones covers exactly why. On a boarding pass or ticket where every millimeter of a tightly designed layout is accounted for, that margin requirement becomes an actual constraint, which is a big part of why the airline industry standardized on Aztec well before QR became a household name for everything else.
Outside ticketing, QR wins clearly. Aztec is technically capable and most modern phone cameras can decode it, but almost nobody recognizes the pattern on sight the way they recognize a QR code, and the habit of pointing a camera and expecting a link preview to appear is built around QR specifically. For a restaurant menu, a business card, a product label, or a marketing campaign, using a format the customer doesn't already trust and expect works against you before you've said anything else.
If you're building ticketing or boarding-pass infrastructure at the scale of an airline, Aztec's margin-free design is a legitimate engineering reason to choose it. If you're generating a code for a business, event, or personal use, QR is the format people already know how to scan on sight, and that familiarity matters more than a specification detail most people will never notice.
It's worth noting that QRSen, like most general-purpose consumer QR generators, focuses specifically on the QR format rather than Aztec, Data Matrix, or other 2D barcode types — this is deliberate rather than a limitation, since QR is the format that fits the overwhelming majority of business, marketing, and personal use cases the tool is built for. Anyone genuinely building airline or transit ticketing infrastructure at scale is typically working with specialized ticketing software that handles Aztec generation as part of a much larger booking system, not a standalone QR generator.