The Portable Document Format (PDF) is what most people use to share information because it can display text, images, and even audio and video on any platform. Most PDFs are for reading only, but that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t modify them. For example, you might want to correct a typo without recreating a whole file, or add or remove text and images. Whatever the job, you need a PDF editor. PCMag has been reviewing document editing software for several decades, so you can trust that all the apps here are up to the task. Our Editors’ Choice winners are ABBYY FineReader for its OCR tools and Adobe Acrobat Pro for its business features, but we also include far more affordable options that handle the basics competently. Below the list, we outline everything you need to know before choosing the best PDF editor for your needs.
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
EDITORS’ NOTE
March 9, 2026: With this update, our lineup of recommended PDF editors remains unchanged. We have vetted the existing picks for currency and availability.
- Exceptionally clear interface
- Best-in-class OCR capabilities
- Screen reader app lets you capture text from any window
- Supports multiple export formats
- Hot Folder feature converts and scans documents automatically
- Complex interface for combining files
- Lacks full-text indexing for fast searches
ABBYY FineReader ($99 per year for the Standard version, $165 per year for the Corporate version) combines a well-designed set of standard PDF management features with class-leading OCR technology for converting scanned images into usable documents. A spacious, intuitive user experience lets you create or edit PDFs, convert them to other formats, and more, all in a few mouse clicks. The advanced OCR editor has a fast, keyboard-friendly interface for fixing the unavoidable OCR errors that you get with scanned documents, and its image editor tool makes short work of adjustments to single or multiple images.
FineReader doesn’t have Adobe’s cloud-based support for gathering responses or payments, but it offers a built-in “hot folder” feature that automatically converts documents you add there into PDFs. (Adobe’s comparable feature is separate from Acrobat and more difficult to set up.) ABBYY FineReader also includes a convenient screen-scraping application that grabs any text on your screen. The Corporate version includes a unique tool for comparing two documents in different formats, unlike Acrobat, which compares only PDFs.
Beginner PDF editors: ABBYY FineReader has an easier-to-manage interface than Acrobat and costs less. If you can do without Adobe’s collaboration features, it’s a great alternative.
People who need OCR features: Put simply, it has no competition in this space. It works quickly and helps you fix issues without much fuss.
Windows users: You need Windows to access all the features ABBYY FineReader offers, as the macOS edition has a more limited set of OCR capabilities. The iOS-only mobile app works well with the Windows version, however.
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ABBYY FineReader Review
- Fine-tunes PDFs for specific printing and display
- Vast range of customization features for high-end printing
- Secure cloud-based service for collaboration and digital signing
- Unique font-matching technology for editing scanned images
- Consistent cross-platform interface
- License allows for two copies
- Expensive compared with similar apps
- Experimental AI feature is almost useless
- Non-standard interface
- No simple whiteout tool (only a more complex redaction tool)
- Can’t split scanned two-page spreads
- Limits on moving contents between pages when editing
Adobe invented the PDF format, and its Acrobat Standard ($179.88 per year) and Pro ($239.88 per year) remain among the most powerful PDF editors and managers on the market. Both have easy-to-use features for sharing PDFs and gathering electronic signatures, and the Pro version lets you create web forms and redact text and images. The latter enables you to collect electronic payments via PayPal’s Braintree service.
If you work with scanned PDFs of old books and magazines, Adobe has a spectacular feature that creates a digital font from the text in the scanned image, which you can then use to add or revise text on the scanned page. Other high-end features include the ability to assign separate sets of page numbers to different parts of a document, for example, if you want to use Roman numerals in one part and Arabic numerals in another.
Acrobat isn’t without some faults, however. Its OCR features lag behind ABBYY FineReader’s in both accuracy and ease of use, and it lacks common features such as the ability to split a two-page spread into separate pages. There’s no easy way to erase parts of a scanned image, either. Moreover, Acrobat’s optional new AI features for summarizing documents and listing action items are still immature and cost $4.99 per month.
Collaborators: If you need professional-level PDF tools and are willing to pay Adobe’s steep subscription price, Acrobat should be your first choice. Its collaboration and data-gathering features are both smooth and powerful.
Cross-platform users: Acrobat runs equally well on Windows and macOS, and mobile versions are available. On every platform, its editing tools enable the most fine-tuned handling of scanned text and images.
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Adobe Acrobat Pro Review
Foxit PDF Editor is a powerful, corporate-level PDF management and editing app with unique features that help you work around the inherent limitations of the PDF format. It’s relatively affordable at $129.99 per year for the version without electronic signing and redaction features, or $159.99 for the version with them.
Foxit licenses its OCR engine from ABBYY (it’s an older version than the latest version of that app), though its editing interface isn’t as convenient. It also offers Acrobat-style document management, complete with cloud-based storage for sharing and signing PDF forms. It matches Acrobat’s ability to assign Arabic and Roman numerals to different sections of a document. The app also has tools for combining multiple text boxes and making text flow smoothly between pages.
Corporate and institutional users: Foxit PDF Editor is an economical alternative to Adobe Acrobat with a competitive feature set. Microsoft 365 users should find its menu ribbon familiar, while support for eDocs and iManage document management systems enables smooth integration into enterprise-level workflows.
Desktop and mobile editors: Foxit PDF runs on both desktop (macOS and Windows) and mobile (Android and iOS) platforms, so you can work on your documents regardless of the device you use.
Nitro PDF is a reliable PDF editor that stands out for its efficient interface. A three-year license ($270) is available, or you can pay $180 per year for a more advanced version.
The app supports document signing and sharing, and it offers convenient features for scanning text from books and magazines. Its whiteout tool, which removes dark page borders and stray marks, and page-cropping feature are both easier and quicker to use than similar ones in rival apps. You can optionally add these or any other tools to its top-line toolbar; advanced features like digital IDs, embedded fonts, redaction, and text-to-speech are also available. Nitro PDF’s OCR capabilities aren’t as accurate or powerful as ABBYY FineReader’s or Adobe Acrobat’s, but they aren’t too far behind.
People who want flexibility: You can choose between a three-year license that gets you app updates or a subscription-based version with more features. The app is available for macOS and Windows.
Solo PDF editors: Nitro PDF is ideal if you and your team don’t need the cloud-based features in Acrobat Pro. Many of its features are easier to user than those in competing apps, too.
PDF-XChange Editor ($62 per year for the standard version, $79 per year for the Plus version) is a top bargain among PDF editors because it closely matches the feature sets of pricier alternatives. But it also stands out for its colorful, tool-packed interface, which you might prefer to the more professional appearances of other apps. The app includes extensive commenting, easy editing, good text-to-speech, and workable OCR features—it relies on the open-source Tesseract software for the latter.
The software makes many of its capabilities easy to access, including an accounting calculator that performs arithmetic and optionally inserts the result as a PDF comment, and a Distance tool that measures the distance between two points on a page. Meanwhile, PDF-XChange Editor’s Split Pages tool divides pages automatically or lets you do it manually—something that Acrobat can’t. If you can’t find a tool, just search for it in the Quick Launch menu.
Creatives: PDF-XChange Editor is ideal if you plan to creatively modify PDFs in dozens of ways. Its interface is probably too busy for corporate settings and routine tasks, but it does help you discover new ways to work with your documents.
Windows users: The app is available only on Windows.
Best Free PDF Editor
PDFgear
PDFgear is the only free PDF editor we’ve found that’s worth the time to download and use. You don’t get what you don’t pay for, so you can’t expect the range and quality of editing tools that you get from commercial software. Still, the interface is blissfully clear and clean, and the app works perfectly for simple functions like filling in a PDF form, merging multiple PDFs, and splitting documents. Its text and image editing features work impressively well with PDFs from Word and Excel. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for PDFs you create from scanned documents.
Like paid products, PDFgear converts PDFs to and from standard document formats. But whereas commercial rivals usually export Word documents from PDF files that retain formatting, PDFgear tends to use the same font each time. Its OCR tools usually produced unusable word salad when I tried exporting scanned documents, too.
Cross-platform editors: The app works on both desktop (macOS and Windows) and mobile (Android and iOS) devices. Several other apps on this list can’t make the same claim.
PDF retouchers who need a free tool: PDFgear is best for minor corrections or merging or splitting PDFs. But it’s completely free, so you really shouldn’t expect more.
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Buying Guide: The Best PDF Editor for 2026
What Can You Do With PDF Software?
PDF editing apps work best for making relatively minor changes to the text or images in a file. For example, all PDF editing apps let you add arrows, comments, and lines as overlays on an existing document. They can all crop the images in a scanned document so that pages are the same size, merge or split documents, and reorder and rotate pages. You can also use them to add bookmarks, hyperlinks to other pages in the same file or external websites, headers, footers, and page numbers. Many can reduce the size of PDF documents by compressing images, too.
PDF documents are fundamentally different from those you create with a document or spreadsheet app. The format isn’t meant to accommodate edits or changes, so any revisions might disrupt its format. The apps here, especially the commercial ones, can handle adding or changing text well, though they still aren’t perfect at it.
Aside from their editing capabilities, PDF apps can also convert Word and Excel files into PDFs and export PDFs to those standard formats. The best apps do a good job of preserving formatting when converting to and from the PDF file type, but you might need to experiment with settings a bit to get the best results. All the PDF apps on this list also use optical character recognition (OCR) to convert scanned documents to searchable text, but results vary drastically in quality.
OCR editing interface in ABBYY FineReader (Credit: ABBYY FineReader/PCMag)
It’s possible to use a PDF editor to build a document from scratch, too. You can simply create a text box and type text into it, insert an image from a file, or use an app’s drawing tools to create shapes and lines. However, it’s still much easier to start on a word processing app and later export to the PDF format.
High-end PDF apps can create PDF forms, either from scratch or via form fields you add in a word processor. Some apps even provide cloud- or e-mail-based methods of circulating forms and gathering data. Finally, top-end apps can sanitize PDFs by removing personal data or redacting sensitive text or images so that nothing can recover them.
How Much Should You Spend on PDF Software?
If all you need to do is merge or split PDF files, make minor textual edits, or replace one photo with another, then you can use a freeware app like PDFgear. For anything more ambitious, you need to buy a license for an app like Nitro PDF Pro ($250) or sign up for a subscription to ABBYY FineReader (starting at $99 per year) or Adobe Acrobat (starting at $155.88 per year). If you need advanced OCR editing to create searchable text from scanned images, go straight to the former.
Even when a freeware app like PDFgear has the same feature as a paid app, the latter tends to do a better job. For example, when you open a PDF for editing in a paid app, it creates editing boxes for complete paragraphs or a whole page. PDFgear, in contrast, tends to put the last line of a paragraph in a separate editing box. This behavior makes it difficult or impossible to preserve formatting because the text you change or edit in the first box won’t flow freely into the second.
What’s the Best Free PDF Software?
PDFgear is by far the best free PDF editor we’ve tried, and the only one that lets you modify existing text in a PDF. Other free PDF software lets you add comments and images, but not edit the text. PDFgear isn’t nearly as easy to use as the paid apps and makes it difficult or impossible to perform some editing tasks, but it’s better than nothing.
If you’re looking at an alternative free PDF editor, make sure to test its editing feature. If it lets you modify existing text, then it might be worth using. If it lets you only add text boxes as an overlay to existing text, then look elsewhere.
Recommended by Our Editors
How Does a PDF Editor Enhance Security?
Every PDF document contains metadata that can identify its creator and much else. You might not want to make this information available to the world. I’ve received PDF documents that were meant to be anonymous but which revealed the names of their creators when I pressed Ctrl-D in Acrobat to bring up the Document Properties dialog. The only way to prevent this kind of security failure is to open the document in a PDF editor, find the menu called Protect or Protection. This menu should offer options to remove personal or hidden data.
PDF protection options in Adobe Acrobat (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Should You Use Online PDF Editors and Converters?
No. You should be very wary of free online services that offer to edit or convert PDF files that you upload to the service and then download back to your computer. Some of these services, like Adobe’s, are safe and reliable. But the FBI has warned that bad actors include malware in the downloaded files, and the CloudSEK security service published a detailed report based on the warning. Even with a legitimate site, you should keep in mind that your PDF files and other documents contain metadata that you might not want to share. It’s much more secure to perform all your PDF editing and conversion tasks on your local machine, and security is always worth paying for.
Can You Edit PDFs in Your Browser?
Yes, but you lose the most granular editing features of standalone apps. At the very least, the most popular cross-platform browsers—Chrome, Firefox, and Edge—let you add digital signatures, images, and text. Apple’s Safari doesn’t have these features, but it offers to open PDFs in the macOS Preview app, which does.
If you want to use your browser to modify the existing text and images in a PDF, you need an add-on like Canva. I won’t use an online service like Canva because I don’t like sharing the hidden metadata in my PDF files, but that might not bother you as much.
