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The best PDF editors do more than allow you to edit text, images – they allow you to add notes, collaborate with clients and colleagues and create and sign online forms. So it's well worth considering one if you work with PDF documents, whether for contracts, proposals, presentations or reports. But where to start? To choose the best PDF editors, we've reviewed a range of the best-known tools and evaluated them based on how much flexibility they offer, how easy they are to use, the quality of results, any extra features and also value for money.
The most famous PDF editors are, of course, Adobe's Acrobat products, and Acrobat Pro remains number one on our list. Available for Windows and Mac, its reliability, ease of use and range of features make it the best PDF editor available overall. However, if you're looking for a free PDF editor, or a PDF editor for iPhone, iPad, Android or Linux, then we've got you covered there as well.
For more useful software for handling documents, take a look at our guide to the best e-signature software. And you can also create documents with the best InDesign alternatives. Meanwhile, read on for our pick of the best PDF editors available now. We'll start with quick links to our top three choices, and then move on to consider detailed pros and cons of our full selection.
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1. Adobe Acrobat Pro: £15.17/$14.99 per month
Download the best PDF editor right now and get a super-reliable solution for accurately reading and editing PDFs. You can try the seven-day free trial and then sign up with a single-app or All Apps subscription with Adobe Creative Cloud.
2. pdfFiller: Reader Offer: Get the 30-day free trial
pdfFiller has been making a name for itself thanks to its ease of use, and feature-rich experience. You can drag and drop your PDF straight on to the website and start editing and sharing your documents. Smooth and hassle-free!
3. Xodo PDF Reader: Free for personal use
Xodo is a cross-platform PDF reader and annotator, and best of all, it's absolutely free to download. You can collaborate on documents and sign them. You'll have to pay for a licence if you want to use it for business or commercial use.
Our expert review:
Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is a name that will already be familiar to many readers, and despite trying out other PDF editors, we still rate it as the best PDF editor for Windows and the best PDF editor for Mac too. We find it's the most reliable option for accurately reproducing original content in PDF form – anyone who’s ever tried to turn a web page into a PDF and been left with a cluttered mess of text and images will know what we mean.
Although even Acrobat Pro DC can't always handle every PDF conversion, we've found it to be fairly reliable over years of use. We also find it to be very easy to use and convenient for collaboration if you need to share documents with clients and colleagues for them to add comments or electronically sign forms and contracts. There are a host of security features, including password protection and the ability to remove metadata and redact specific sections.
You can automatically compare two versions of a PDF to find the differences between them. You can turn scanned documents into editable, searchable PDFs. And you can validate and fix PDFs for ISO and accessibility standards, too. This all makes Acrobat Pro DC the most flexible PDF editor around. And despite so many features, the interface remains clean and uncluttered, although there's also a bit of a learning curve if you’ve never used a PDF editor before.
Don't confuse Adobe Acrobat Pro DC with the slightly cheaper Adobe Acrobat Standard DC, which is available for Windows only. The latter doesn't have all of the same advanced features of the Pro DC version. You can get Adobe Acrobat Pro DC through a single-app subscription, but if you're likely to use other Adobe apps, the best value option is an All Apps Creative Cloud subscription. This gives you access to a huge range of creative tools, including Photoshop and Illustrator. For more details on pricing, see our full Adobe Acrobat review and our article download Adobe Acrobat.
