Best PDF Editors Compared

Acrobat is the reference PDF editor, made by the company that invented the format. Standard costs $14.99 per month on an annual plan paid monthly and lets you edit text and images, export to Word and sign. Pro at $19.99 per month adds OCR for scanned documents, comparing two versions of a file and redaction. Without a yearly commitment the prices are $24.99 and $29.99. A Studio tier with Adobe's AI Assistant costs $24.99 per month.

Be aware of the contract: the cheapest price is an annual plan billed monthly, and cancelling it after the first 14 days can cost up to 50 % of the remaining months. The free Adobe Acrobat Reader still opens, comments and signs PDFs without paying.

PDFelement covers the features most people actually use from Acrobat: editing text and images, OCR, forms, converting to Word and Excel, and annotations. The yearly plan costs about $79.99 and a perpetual license starts at about $129.99. The pricing page lists several plans and two prices per plan without clear labels, so check exactly which platforms your plan includes before buying.

The free trial runs 14 days after registration without a credit card, but adds a watermark and locks OCR. In the paid plans, e-signatures and the AI features have usage limits, and with a one-time license the mobile and web apps are only included for a limited time. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Foxit is a long-standing Acrobat alternative popular in companies. PDF Editor costs $129.99 per user per year and runs on Windows, Mac and the web; PDF Editor+ at $159.99 adds the mobile apps and Foxit eSign with 150 envelopes per year. Foxit also still sells a perpetual license of PDF Editor 14 for $209.99, which many people prefer over a subscription.

The 14-day trial needs no credit card. In the basic plan you can fill in forms and sign them yourself, but sending documents for others to sign requires Editor+.

Nitro's main plan is now called PDF Standard and is billed yearly per user. The official pricing page loads its prices dynamically and we could not read a stable figure on the check date, so please look up the current price on Nitro's site. A one-time PDF Classic license exists for Windows only.

Nitro's strong point is the trial: 14 days with every feature and without a credit card. OCR works in batches, and Nitro Sign for electronic signatures is built in.

Smallpdf is a set of simple web tools for converting, compressing, merging and signing PDFs. The free tier is limited in how many tasks you can do; the Pro subscription removes the limits and adds features such as OCR and editing. Smallpdf's pricing page loads prices with JavaScript and varies by country, so we list no figure here; third-party listings mention roughly $9 to $15 per month.

Like all web services, Smallpdf uploads your files to its servers for processing. For private documents, check its privacy policy or use a tool that works locally.

iLovePDF offers dozens of free web tools and a cheap Premium plan. On the check date its pricing page showed Premium at €5 per month billed yearly (€60) or €9 billed monthly; prices in US dollars were not shown to us. Premium adds the desktop and mobile apps, larger files, OCR conversion to Word and Excel and a few advanced e-signatures.

Simple signatures are unlimited even for free. Editing text is basic, and as a web service it uploads your files for processing.

PDF24 Creator is a free Windows program from a German company. It merges, splits, compresses and converts PDFs, runs OCR and works completely offline, so files never leave your computer. It is free for private and commercial use with no limits; version 11.31.1 was released on October 8, 2026.

What it cannot do is edit existing text inside a PDF; for that PDF24 points to its online editor, which uploads the file. There is no Mac or Linux version.