Best PDF Editors in 2026

Adobe Acrobat is the PDF application from Adobe, whose co-founder John Warnock started the project that became the Portable Document Format. Adobe dates the work to 1991, when Warnock launched what he called the Camelot Project, which had become PDF by 1992; the format is now an open standard maintained by ISO as ISO 32000. Adobe states that more than 400 billion PDFs are opened in Acrobat each year.

Acrobat is sold in three subscription tiers. Standard covers creating, editing, converting, organising and password-protecting PDFs and collecting e-signatures. Pro adds more than 70 advanced tools, including redaction, web forms, scan-to-editable conversion and version comparison. Acrobat Studio, the top tier, adds the AI Assistant, PDF Spaces (collections of documents that can be queried together) and Adobe Express design tools. Business versions of each tier add the Admin Console, 24x7 support and licence retention when staff leave.

Acrobat's position rests on fidelity: it is the implementation against which other editors are usually tested for forms, signatures and accessibility tags. Its documented limitations are price and contract terms. It is among the more expensive editors in this list, no perpetual licence is offered on the pricing page, and the default annual plan billed monthly carries a cancellation fee of up to half the remaining commitment after the first 14 days. Adobe announced in September 2026 that Anil Chakravarthy will succeed Shantanu Narayen as chief executive on 1 December 2026.

Foxit PDF Editor is made by Foxit Software, which its company timeline says launched in California in 2001 and which lists Fremont, California as its US office. Foxit began with a lightweight PDF reader and grew into a full editing suite aimed at the same business buyers as Adobe Acrobat.

Two subscription tiers are sold. PDF Editor covers Windows, macOS and web and includes editing, conversion, OCR, forms, password protection, the Foxit DMS document store and an AI Assistant with 300 credits a month. PDF Editor+ adds iOS and Android apps, AI Smart Redact for automatic removal of personal data, 2,000 AI credits a month and Foxit eSign with 150 envelopes a year. Unlike Adobe, Foxit still sells a perpetual licence (Foxit PDF Editor 14), and volume licensing is available for 30 or more seats.

Foxit's main attractions are lower list prices than Acrobat for comparable functions, a choice between subscription and one-time purchase, and a 14-day trial without a credit card. Its limitations are that mobile editing and the larger AI allowance require the higher tier, that the perpetual version does not include the cloud and AI services sold with subscriptions, and that the pricing page states prices with a dollar sign and local taxes but does not name the currency explicitly.

Nitro is a PDF and e-signature vendor that its about page says was founded more than two decades ago in Melbourne, Australia; it now lists offices in San Francisco, Dublin, Toronto, Antwerp, Porto and Melbourne and states that it serves more than 67% of the Fortune 500. Nitro Software Limited was listed on the ASX until a contested takeover in 2022–2023, in which Potentia Capital's bid competed with a scheme from KKR-backed Alludo. Potentia and HarbourVest completed the acquisition of the remaining 80.2% stake on 31 March 2023 at A$2.20 per share, with compulsory acquisition of the remainder beginning the same day.

The PDF line is sold as Nitro PDF Standard (per user per month, billed annually), Nitro PDF Plus for large organisations, which adds single sign-on, domain control, Azure Information Protection and Nitro Analytics, and Nitro PDF Classic, a Windows-only licence paid once for a three-year term. Separate Nitro Sign plans cover e-signature, including advanced and qualified signatures under eIDAS and ZertES on the Enterprise tier.

Nitro is designed for company-wide rollouts with an admin portal and usage analytics. Its main drawback for comparison is that the pricing page shows no numeric prices; rates appear at checkout or through sales, and online purchases are capped at 20 licences.

PDFelement is published by Wondershare, the software company behind Filmora, UniConverter, Recoverit and Dr.Fone. It runs on Windows and macOS, with iOS, Android, web tools and a PDFelement Cloud storage service, and Wondershare states that it holds ISO 27001 certification and is a member of the PDF Association.

PDFelement is positioned on price. At the time of review the store listed a Personal perpetual licence at $129.99 against a $159 list price, a Team licence at $139, a cross-platform perpetual licence at $139.99 and an education plan at $39.99 per year; these are promotional prices and change frequently. The product page lists a long set of AI functions: an AI knowledge base built from PDFs and Office files, summarising, translation, grammar checking, an AI-content detector, contract review, smart redaction, chat with PDFs and images, rewriting and read-aloud.

Its strengths are the one-time licence option and the breadth of conversion and AI features at a low entry price. Its limitations are that prices change with promotions, so list and sale prices on the store differ widely, and that store pages are split by platform, which makes like-for-like comparison harder than with vendors who publish a single price table.

Power PDF is sold by Tungsten Automation, the company formerly called Kofax, which announced in January 2024 that it would evolve from the Kofax name to Tungsten Automation. The product was earlier sold as Nuance Power PDF and then Kofax Power PDF, and the mobile app listing still carries the Kofax name.

Three retail editions are offered as perpetual licences. Power PDF Standard for Windows, at US$129, creates, edits and exports PDFs in an interface modelled on Microsoft Office. Power PDF Advanced for Windows, at US$179, adds e-signatures, batch processing, Bates numbering, advanced redaction, password protection and integrations with SharePoint and iManage. Power PDF for Mac, at US$129, covers annotation, conversion to Word, Excel and image formats, page organisation and form filling. A Power PDF Business subscription, with a minimum of five users, is priced by quote.

Power PDF suits buyers who want to pay once. Bates numbering and iManage support make the Advanced edition common in legal settings. The trade-off is that retail perpetual licences do not include future upgrades or updates, so a later version must be bought again (with upgrade discounts for existing customers), and the Mac edition has a narrower toolset than Windows Advanced.

PDF-XChange Editor is developed by PDF-XChange Co Ltd, whose wholly owned subsidiary Tracker Software Products is registered in England; the product was long distributed under the Tracker Software name. It runs only on Windows 10 and later, with 32-bit, 64-bit and ARM64 installers; version 11.1.2.0 was current at the time of review.

The free download is unusually capable. The vendor counts 257 of the product's 402 features as free, about 70% of the total. Paid licences are perpetual: Editor costs US$62 and Editor Plus US$79 for one user, each with a year of maintenance that can be renewed at about 25% of the original price if done within 30 days of expiry. Editor Plus adds an enhanced OCR engine, fillable form creation, dynamic stamps, document comparison and automatic form-field detection. A separate PDF-XChange PRO bundle is also sold.

The editor is known for a dense interface with many tools exposed at once, which experienced users value and new users may find cluttered. Its main limitations are the lack of macOS, mobile and web versions and the absence of a hosted collaboration or e-signature service comparable to Acrobat or Foxit.

FineReader PDF is ABBYY's desktop PDF application, built around the company's optical character recognition engine. It is sold as Standard and Corporate editions for Windows and a separate edition for macOS, each as a single-user subscription.

The product's distinctive strength is converting scans, photographs and image-only PDFs into searchable, editable files; ABBYY describes the Standard edition as powered by AI-based OCR. The Corporate edition adds document comparison, which identifies differences between two versions of a document even across formats, and Hot Folder automation that converts up to 5,000 pages a month on a schedule. The Mac edition provides OCR and conversion but is described by ABBYY as having a limited PDF feature set.

FineReader suits users whose PDF work is mostly digitising paper. Its limitations for this list are that prices on the pricing page available to this review were in euros only, that no perpetual licence was listed, that the Mac edition is narrower than the Windows editions, and that the trial is only seven days. Buyers who need e-signature workflows or mobile editing will need another tool alongside it.

PDF Expert is developed by Readdle Limited, the maker of the Spark email client, Scanner Pro, Documents and Fluix. Readdle reports more than 235 million product downloads, more than 300 employees, eight hubs and staff in 30 countries.

PDF Expert is built only for Apple devices: Mac, iPhone and iPad. Premium features include editing of text, images and links, annotation, OCR, conversion to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, signing, translation and an AI assistant called PDF Copilot. Two premium options are listed: an annual subscription at $79.99 covering iPhone, iPad and Mac, and a lifetime licence at $139.99 for Mac only, both with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Readdle notes that new features for lifetime holders may come at extra cost.

PDF Expert is valued for speed and an interface that follows macOS conventions closely. Its limitations are the absence of Windows, Android and web versions, which makes it unsuitable for mixed-platform teams, the restriction of the lifetime licence to Mac, and a lighter set of enterprise administration features than Acrobat, Foxit or Nitro. The pricing page uses a dollar sign without stating a currency code.

Xodo is a family of PDF applications powered by Apryse, the document-processing SDK company formerly known as PDFTron, which lists Xodo, Xodo Sign, iText and Scanbot among its brands and states that it has more than 20,000 customers.

The Xodo Document Suite bundles web, desktop and mobile apps. Xodo Web offers more than 40 online tools, while Xodo Desktop, based on the PDF Studio application, runs offline on Windows, macOS and Linux with more than 60 tools and can be bought as a perpetual licence. Features include editing, compression, annotation, redaction, merging and splitting, conversion, OCR, PDF comparison, DOCX editing without Microsoft Word, AI summaries, sanitising and task automation; AskPDF, high compression and PDF/A validation are web-only.

Xodo is one of the few editors here with a Linux desktop version. Its limitations are a free plan restricted to one action per day, trials that require a payment method, a no-refund policy, and pricing that changes with promotions; the 40% discount on the Suite at the time of review was due to end on 31 October 2026.

Sejda is operated by Sejda BV of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and began in 2010 as an open-source project. It offers a browser-based editor and a desktop application that processes files locally without uploading them.

Sejda's pricing is built around short passes as well as subscriptions. A Web Week Pass costs $5 for seven days and does not auto-renew; a Desktop+Web annual plan costs $63 per user per year. Paid users get unlimited documents without page or hourly limits, OCR for documents up to 100 pages, batch processing, uploads up to 500MB and up to 21 minutes of processing per task. Team discounts rise from 10% for two to four members to 60% for 50 or more. The free tier needs no sign-up but applies page, hourly, upload and tool limits that the pricing page does not quantify.

Sejda suits occasional users and those who want a desktop option that keeps files local. Its limitations are a web editor that uploads files to Sejda's servers, OCR capped at 100 pages per document, no mobile apps, and a pricing page that shows the monthly web price in a format ($ 750) that does not clearly state the amount.

iLovePDF is an online PDF toolkit that also offers desktop and mobile apps. It is best known for single-purpose tools such as merge, split, compress and convert, which can be used without an account.

Three plans are listed. Basic is free and gives access to essential tools with per-task limits; for example, merging up to 25 files, compressing two files per batch, and file-size caps such as 100MB for merges and 15MB for Office-to-PDF conversion, with AI tools limited to one task each. Premium costs €5 per month billed annually (€60 per year) or €9 billed monthly, for one to 25 users, and adds unlimited processing, digital signatures, workflows, an ad-free interface, priority support, 2,000 AI credits and a choice of seven processing regions. Business, for 25 or more users, is quoted and adds SSO, custom contracts, a dedicated account manager and 11 processing regions.

iLovePDF is suited to conversion, compression and page operations rather than detailed editing of text layout, where desktop editors such as Acrobat or Foxit are stronger. The pricing page available to this review showed euro prices only and does not state where the company is based.

Smallpdf is a browser-based PDF platform offering conversion, compression, editing, signing and organising tools, with a free plan and paid subscriptions billed monthly or annually.

The pricing page's published FAQ states that paid plans can be started with a free trial that can be cancelled at any time; if the trial is cancelled, the account is downgraded to the free plan when the seven-day period ends. Payment is accepted by PayPal, Visa and Mastercard, and subscribers on monthly and annual plans receive new tools and features as they are released. Plan prices on the page are rendered dynamically according to the visitor's region and were not captured by this review, so none are quoted here.

Smallpdf is similar in scope to iLovePDF: strong for one-step tasks such as compressing, converting or signing a file in a browser, and less suited to detailed layout editing, Bates numbering or large-scale redaction, which are the domain of desktop editors. Users with confidential documents should note that browser tools process files on the vendor's servers, as with other online-only services in this list.

PDFgear is a PDF application that its website describes as completely free and usable without signing up, including for educational and business use. It is available for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, the web and as a Chrome extension.

The application covers editing of text, images, shapes, links, signatures and form fields; annotation; conversion to and from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text and image formats; merging, splitting, compressing and page management; and OCR for scanned PDFs in more than 30 languages. PDFgear AI provides document summaries and question answering over a PDF. A related e-signing service, eSignGear, is linked from the site.

PDFgear is the strongest free option in this list for users who need actual text editing rather than only page operations. Its limitations are that the website does not name the company that develops it, that no business licensing, administration console or support commitments are described, and that the absence of a paid tier leaves its long-term funding model unstated. Organisations with procurement or compliance requirements will usually need a vendor that publishes these details, such as Foxit, Nitro or Adobe.