Best PDF editors: Premium, budget, and free options

Adobe Acrobat Pro remains the industry standard for good reason. Its rich combination of creation, editing, reviewing, and security features are mimicked by the best alternative options, but we feel Acrobat still does it best. Its recent interface redesign makes it much easier to navigate through its robust toolset than the nested menus of yore, and its cloud subscription option puts its advanced features within reach of more individuals and small businesses. (See how it compares to the Adobe Acrobat Standard.)

Though many of its features are available in other, cheaper PDF editors, Acrobat is still the editor against which all others are judged. Not surprisingly, Acrobat Pro includes an Al assistant, albeit not at an additional $4.99 per month. Depending on your PDF editing needs, the AI’s ability to summarize, answer questions, or extract key details from documents could earn its keep in valuable time saved. See our article on “5 ways Adobe Acrobat’s AI Assistant gives you a productivity edge.”

A fully featured PDF editor that can go toe-to-toe with Acrobat Pro’s feature set, Nitro PDF is a less costly alternative by about $60 per year. The Standard plan’s subscription fee is $15 a month, or $180 per year. Its full suite of PDF editing features cover the range of needs and scenarios: content editing; review and markup; form fill and signing; and multiple security options for sensitive documents including permissions, password protection, and data redaction. It even facilitates adding, removing, and editing bates numbering in legal documents.

A Microsoft Office-style ribbon interface makes workflows feel familiar and intuitive. The addition of AI is judicious, and can provide practical assistance such as by summarizing PDFs and allowing you to ask questions about content.

But don’t just take our word for Nitro PDF’s impressive capabilities. You can learn that first hand by taking advantage of Nitro PDF’s 14-day free trial. No credit card is required and none of the features are locked — there’s nothing like a test drive to persuade you.

EaseUS PDF Editor might not have the name recognition of some of the other editors on this list, but it’s more than capable of holding its own in the crowded PDF editor market. It provides all of the essential tools for managing PDF files without any of the elaborate or hard-to-understand features. It allows users to jump right in to their toolset and get straight to editing.

While EaseUS’s features are great, they are also pretty standard fare among PDF editors. What makes it stand out among the pack is its affordable price—$29.95 a month, $49.95 annually, or $79.95 for a lifetime license. It’s a great value for those who regularly edit PDFs and don’t want to pay out the nose.

EaseUS also offers a fully functional free version (with embedded watermarks on your edited documents) so users can take it for a spin to see if it meets their needs before they commit to paying any money.

PDF Candy is the rare free PDF editor that offers a lot of the features you’d typically have to pay for. We’re talking scanning, multiple file-conversion options, and OCR functionality. A whopping 98 tools in all. This is what makes PDF Candy stand out among the multitude of lesser free PDF editors.

Of course, being free, there are compromises. In this case, the interface is a little disjointed, with the tool icons lacking any discernible organizing principle. But once you get familiar with the layout, you’re off and running.

There’s also the fact of being limited to one PDF task per hour with the free version. This is a non-issue if your needs are modest and consist of the occasional PDF editing task. If you want unfettered access, you need to shell out $6 per month, or $48 per year.

PDF Expert is an excellent editor that fits seamlessly into the Apple ecosystem, making it our pick for Macs, iPads, and iPhone users.

While macOS does include a PDF editor in its Preview app, iOS devices don’t have a native PDF editor and PDF Expert fills that gap nicely.

It has a clean and intuitive interface and offers a plethora of easy-to-use editing options such as page management, converting scanned files into editable documents, and conversion to other file formats, among other things. The pricing plan is also considerably cheaper than most of the other top picks, meaning this is a no-brainer for Apple users.

In its latest iteration, PDF Expert includes and AI-powered chat assistant that can be particularly helpful with long or complex documents. For example, it can extract key points, summarize information, and generate hashtags as a navigation aid.

Mac users needn’t look beyond the macOS for their PDF editing needs, since there is a full set of PDF markup tools already available at their disposal in Apple Preview. It has the chops to handle most personal and business PDF editing needs, including encryption, password protection, and permissions for files.

Apple Preview’s PDF features and capabilities are impressive and should be all you need for most common editing tasks. The drawback, of course, is that only Mac users can take advantage of them.

pdfFiller is a browser-based PDF editor that allows you do to just about everything PDF-related—editing, securing, sharing, creating, and storing PDF files—all from its intuitive and simple web interface.

Its design is similar to a desktop app, with the toolbar across the top, and document thumbnails along the side, so it’s very easy to select the page you want to work on and perform the desired function, be it adding, deleting, or copying/pasting text; changing font style, size, and color; and so on. A standard set of markup tools is also available. It has a surprisingly deep set of features for both personal and business use. For instance the Premium plan offers an impressive legal document library, as well as SignNow support.

While incredibly versatile, not all of pdfFiller’s advanced features will suit everyone. Fortunately, there are three subscription tiers, which gives users a way to meet their editing needs without paying extra for unnecessary features: Basic for $8/mo; Plus for $12/mo; Premium for $15/mo with an annual commitment. Month-to-month options are also available, but at a higher cost, of course.