Best PDF editors 2023
Unlike most documents, it’s difficult to edit a PDF. Intentionally difficult: the big advantage of the Portable Document Format is that the person reading can’t modify it, either by accident or on purpose.
When you share a PDF, you can be sure the people who receive it won’t be able to (easily) change it, unless it’s to fill out a form, and maybe sign it.
This advantage quickly becomes a disadvantage if you need to alter a PDF and don’t have the original, editable file to hand. But that, of course, is where PDF editors come in. Where a PDF viewer (such asAdobe Acrobat Reader DC, Apple Preview and some web browsers) offers very limited selection of tools for form filling, signing and annotation, a PDF editor allows you to change text, replace images, and do a whole lot more besides.
Below you’ll find our current recommendations, including Adobe’s own (which cannot be bought outright, it must be subscribed to) and much more affordable options.
Best PDF Editors
1. Adobe Acrobat DC – Best overall
Pros
Cons
Adobe invented the PDF, and so you’d expect it to have the best PDF editing software. And, on the whole, it does.
Unlike in years gone by, Adobe now wants you to pay a subscription rather than buying Acrobat outright. The DC stands for Document Cloud, and hints at the fact that you can store your PDFs in the cloud and collaborate on them with others.
There are two versions: Acrobat DC and Acrobat Pro DC. If you don’t need many editing features, you can just use Acrobat DC, which is the standard version. While this works out at $12.99/£13.14 per month, the Pro version is hardly any more expensive at $14.99/£15.17 per month and adds support for mobile devices, Macs as well as offering more advanced editing features.
See Adobe Acrobat DC plans
2. Tracker PDF-XChange Editor – Best budget choice
Pros
Cons
Costing significantly less than virtually all other business-oriented PDF editors, yet providing similar functionality, Tracker PDF-XChange Editor is well worth trying out. You can download the free version without any payment details and it’ll continue working as a free version indefinitely, but will add watermarks to the pages of saved PDFs and limits you to certain features. If you want to be able to delete, insert and move pages, for example, you’ll need to pay. Similarly, if you want to edit headers and footers, add and edit Bates numbering, those aren’t available for free.
The interface is similar to Microsoft Office, and it’s all intuitive. In addition to editing text, changing images and other core features, PDF-XChange Editor lets you do things such as adding arrows to highlight things, callouts with text, line and distance annotations and it will also open and convert WebP images.
One thing it won’t do is to let you edit scanned documents. To do that you’ll need thePro version of PDF-XChange Editorwhich comes with an improved OCR plugin and various other add-ons, and costs about twice the price of the standard version.
A single user lifetime license of PDF-XChange Editor will set you back just $56 (approx. £46), and note that this is for Windows: no other operating systems are supported, but there is an ARM64 version for PCs that don’t use x386 processors.
Buy Tracker PDF-XChange Editor
3. PDFgear – Best free PDF editor
Pros
Cons
If being free to use wasn’t reason enough to givePDFgeara try, it’s also the only PDF editor here that uses AI to summarise the contents of a document and some other clever things. It’s a proper editor as well: it has a lot of the tools you’d expect to find in a paid-for editor and is available for Windows, Mac and mobile devices.
The interface is divided into five tabs with “Hot Tools” being the first, then options to convert from and to PDF, Merge & Split, and – last – All Tools. When you actually open a file, PDFgear offers an Office-style interface where you can edit text just as you would in Word or any word procesor.
It’s the AI Copilot feature that makes PDFgear stand out though. You can type natural-language commands to get things done, such as “Convert this PDF to Excel format” or “Summarise this PDF”. You can even use it to find information within a document, which can save a lot of time.
You can’t use PDFgear to create forms, but if this and the fact there’s no direct integration with cloud storage services aren’t deal-breakers, then there’s a lot to like here.
4. Kofax Power PDF – Best alternative to Adobe Acrobat
Pros
Cons
Previously distributed under the Nuance brand, Kofax Power PDF is intuitive and easy to use, especially if you’re familiar with Microsoft Office. And that means you will be able to get up and running with it very quickly.
There are again two versions: Power PDF Standard and Power PDF Advanced.
Standard has the core features most people need, such as creating PDFs from various formats and combining multiple files into a single PDF. You can also edit text within PDFs, change images, annotate and more. It will also make scanned documents searchable using OCR.
With Advanced you can redact information, apply Bates numbering to pages, export to various cloud storage services and have multiple people working on the same document at the same time, though this only works if they’re on the same local network, which somewhat limits its usefulness.
There are versions for Windows and macOS, but not for phones or tablets. That may not be an issue for you, but it’s worth noting.
Of course the major difference here is that you buy Power PDF outright, and this makes it a lot cheaper than Acrobat DC unless you only need to edit PDFs very occasionally, in which case you could start and stop an Acrobat subscription.
But for small businesses that deal with PDFs regularly, it’s a great choice.
Get Kofax Power PDF
5. Wondershare PDFelement
Pros
Cons
PDFelement Pro has evolved over the past couple of years and has a slick interface that’s intuitive and the tools are easy to use. You can create a PDF from scratch, but can also import a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document.
We found this worked well, except for large Excel sheets since there’s no option to select just a portion of the sheet you want to import: it’s all or nothing.
On unprotected documents you can click the ‘Edit text’ button and do exactly that. Unlike some PDF editors, which force you to cover existing text (like using Tippex) and then type over the top, PDFelement allows you to select and modify text just as you can in Word and is pretty good at recognising the original font that was used. Plus, you can select and move images around at will, delete elements and import new images.
As you’d expect from a paid-for product, it allows you to sign and protect documents as well as create forms.
There’s a free trial which adds a watermark to your documents, and it will only convert 5 pages of a document longer than 10 pages, so it’s not an alternative to paying. Speaking of which, there are various options: you can subscribe for six months, a year or buy a perpetual license, which is good value if you know you’ll be editing PDFs for more than a year.
Though it’s far from obvious when you visit Wondershare’s website, there are Standard and Pro versions of PDFelement, and many people will find the cheaper Standard version included everything they need.Here’show the two compare,and if you scroll down to the bottom of this page you’ll find the option to buy the Standard version which isn’t obvious if you use the link below for the main ‘buy now’ page.
The Pro version adds features such as Bates numbering and the ability to edit, delete, cut, copy, paste, and insert new text and images in scanned documents using OCR technology.
Note that the version you buy is specific to Windows or macOS, and it’s only if you buy the more expensive Bundle version that you get support for iPhone / iPad (the latter of which supports commenting with an Apple Pencil).
Get Wondershare PDFelement
6. Nitro PDF Pro
Pros
Cons
Nitro is a fully featured PDF editor that’s very easy to use and one of the best alternatives to Adobe Acrobat DC. Like its rivals, Nitro Pro allows you to createand edit PDFs, form, use digital signatures and make comments. Plus, there’s integrated optical character recognition (OCR) so that scanned paper documents can be turned into truly editable PDFs (and it will automatically align wonky scanned documents).
We like the integration with Microsoft 365, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive for Business and Dropbox which makes it very easy to open and save files directly to those cloud storage services.
When it comes to editing PDFs, Nitro makes it a breeze to change text, rearrange images, add forms and more. You can change the order of pages in a document simply by dragging and dropping. And it’s also easy to sign a PDF using the QuickSign shortcut.
As you’d expect, you can insert and edit Bates numbering, and add passwords to secure sensitive PDFs.
The only snag is that Nitro Pro is far from the cheapest option, but you do get a huge range of features and it’s ideal if you deal with PDFs all the time. Fortunately, Nitro offers a two-week trial that doesn’t require a credit card, so you can find out if it’s right for you without spending any money.
And, of course, unlike Acrobat DC, you don’t have to pay a monthly subscription to continue using it although subscription options are there if you only want to use it to edit PDFs for a short time.
Get Nitro Pro
7. Foxit PDF Editor
Pros
Cons
Previously called PhantomPDF, Foxit PDF Editor, which comes in Standard and Pro versions, provides all the editing features you’d expect from a paid-for application. Unlike most rivals, it’s available on Android, iOS as well as Windows and macOS. Oddly, the Pro version is only available for Windows and, if you prefer, there’s a much cheaper cloud version if you’re happy without a dedicated desktop app.
Those desktop apps can be bought outright, or you can subscribe for a month or annually.
The user interface is easy to use (mainly because it borrows heavily from Microsoft Office) and Foxit provides no shortage of tutorial videos and easy access to support options to get you up to speed in record time.
The Pro version offers additional features including advanced editing, shared review initiation, higher security, additional file compression and more. Free trials are available for both (with no payment details required) so you can see if, say, the Standard version can do everything you need it to before you buy.
If you only need very basic editing options such as annotation, highlighting and signing PDFs, then Foxit also offersFoxit Readertotally free of charge.
Get Foxit PDF Editor
8. Able2Extract Professional
Pros
Cons
Able2Extract Pro may have an odd name, but this is a fully-fledged PDF creator and editor.
It can also take a PDF and convert it to various formats including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. When converting to Excel, you can select only the content you want to extract (the name is relevant here) and see a preview of what it will look like before actually exporting it. One of the latest improvements is thesmart layout detector which attempts to retain details such as cell borders, fonts, merged cells, background, and border colors.
Editing functions include being able to highlight and replace text (fonts cannot always be matched of course), remove pages and annotate and redact text. You can protect a PDF with a password and differing file permissions, too.
One other feature, new for version 16, is the ability to compare two documents to see if there are any differences between them. But there are plenty of other tools, including signing and encrypting PDFs, batch conversion and creation and the creation and editing of forms.
At $199.99 (approx. £165), Able2Extract isn’t of the cheapest packages here, having gone up $50 in price since we last checked and where it used to be $34.95 for a 30-day license, that’s now much less appealing $99.99. There are no subscription options (unless you count the 30-day version), and no web version.
Get Able2Extract Professional
9. Qoppa Software PDF Studio Pro
Pros
Cons
Qoppa PDF Studio, like so many of its rivals, comes in Standard and Pro versions. You’ll probably want to go for Pro because it includes the full set of tools and features. New in the 2022 version of Studio Pro is the Action Wizard which lets you automate the tasks you regularly need to do with PDFs. Once you’ve saved the commands and functions as a series of steps, you can then apply them with a single click in future. For example, you could create a custom action to OCR a document, optimise it and then save it.
Other valuable additions are the ability to create a table of contents from bookmarks (and customise how it looks), recover documents with auto-save, preview thumbnails of PDFs (in Windows) and convert PDFs to Word documents, even if you don’t have Word installed.
Session Manager is another key addition which lets you quickly save all the PDFs you had open, and then later re-open them exactly as you had them before. It’s another time-saving feature that will be welcomed by those who work with PDFs day in, day out.
Although there’s no mobile app, that won’t be a major issue for too many people, and Qoppa is sensibly priced at $99 (around £82) for the Standard version and $139 (approx. £115) for Pro. These are one-time fees, which make Qoppa great value.
FAQ
Are online PDF editors any good?
Some online editors includeDocFly,FormSwift PDF editorandSwifDoo. They’re free to use, but most of them lack the tools you want, such as the ability to directly edit the text in a document. They can often convert documents to and from PDF and merge or split PDFs.
In general, you get what you pay for and you’ll have the best experience with a paid-for PDF editing app that runs on your laptop or PC, rather than uploading files to a website.
Is there a good free PDF editor?
The answer depends on what you need to do with a PDF. It can be worth trying a free editor to see if it has the tools and options to make the necessary edits, but they may put limits on the number of pages your document can have, the number of PDFs you can edit before paying and might put a watermark on each page when you save it.
One of the best free PDF editors is PDFgear, which includes a lot of editing tools, and also uses AI for text-based control and summarisation of PDF files.
Is is worth paying for a PDF editor?
Yes, if you need to work with PDFs regularly and need advanced features including form creation, digital signature and ID certification, and collaborative review and commenting. These are not generally available with free PDF editors. There are other advantages, too, including tech support and – potentially – a better user interface that’s more efficient to use.
Many paid-for PDF editors allow you to trial them for free so you can find out if a particular one is right for your needs or not.
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Author: Jim Martin, Executive Editor, Tech Advisor
Jim has been testing and reviewing products for over 20 years. His main beats include VPN services and antivirus. He also covers smart home tech, mesh Wi-Fi and electric bikes.
