The best PDF editors let you do even more with PDF files, from marking them up to making changes to the text and images they include.
Although PDF files may appear finished, they can be edited and changed in the same way as a text document. You just need the right software to do it. The best PDF editors allow you to open almost any PDF file and from here you can edit, modify, annotate, sign or convert it to other popular file formats such as Microsoft Word’s Doc and Docx.
If you work with PDF files regularly as part of your job, while studying, or maybe even as a hobby, one of the best PDF editors will certainly make things easier for you. We’ve tested more than half a dozen different options and these are the best for modifying text, changing images, and annotating PDFs. On a budget, these are the best free PDF editors.
The best PDF editors you can buy today
Best overall PDF editor
You’d expect Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to be great because it comes from Adobe, the birthplace of the portable document format. To some extent, this full-service PDF editing app lives up to that expectation.
Acrobat Pro DC offers a complete set of PDF editing tools and even allows you to edit scanned documents. Acrobat DC’s OCR engine can convert scanned documents into text, which you can then search and change.
But Acrobat doesn’t let you convert an entire document the moment you open it. Instead, the app waits for you to start using Pro DC’s editing tools, recognizing and converting pages as you select them for editing. Changing text in an OCR document was simple and the results look great.
It’s also easy to edit images and text in documents you haven’t scanned. I was able to make changes to everything without problems.
What I don’t like about Acrobat Pro DC is the interface. It looks like a half-baked demo of what the app could be. Editing tools surround your document and the user interface feels disorganized and offers few customization options.
Since it is designed to work on both Mac and PC, Acrobat Pro DC does not seem to belong in either environment. This doesn’t make this program bad at what it’s supposed to do; it just makes you feel like you’re working outside of your chosen operating system.
The best free PDF editor
Our pick for the best free PDF editor is PDF Candy, because it offers something that many free options don’t: an OCR feature for scanning text. You can’t edit text with OCR in this web-based PDF editor, but you can upload PDF files, extract text, and create a text document, RTF file, or Word document in .doc and .docx formats.
You can choose from 44 tools to create or convert PDF files. It’s also easy to rearrange pages within a document, add watermarks, protect PDF files with passcodes, edit metadata within a PDF file, split or add pages to documents, and extract images. Actual text editing is quite limited, which is a compromise to enjoy a fairly feature-rich free PDF editor.
Once you’ve made your edits in PDF Candy, you can download the edited document or upload a new document to work on. PDF Candy keeps all your documents in a queue so you can download them all at once once you’re done making changes to them.
The best PDF editor for annotations
PDFescape is a basic web-based PDF editing and annotation program that you can use for free to work on PDF documents smaller than 10 MB or 100 pages, whichever is larger. (PDFescape used to limit it to 50 pages, so the higher limit is a welcome change.) If you need to edit larger files, you can upgrade to a premium account for $36 a year. There is also an “ultimate” plan for $72 per year.
Accessible through any modern web browser, PDFescape does not offer OCR capabilities like PDF Candy does. But PDFescape’s annotation tools are easy to use. You’ll find a pretty robust set of standard annotation tools that can easily add, highlight, and strike out text; insert notes; and mark the pages of your PDF file. With the web app’s embed tools, you can also add new images and text to a document, delete text, and add web links and form fields.
PDFescape has some important limitations when it comes to adding new text. Since there are no OCR capabilities, you can’t make changes to existing text; you are limited to adding new text to an existing document. Additionally, the app has very limited font options, as it does not use any of the fonts on your computer. Therefore, you are limited to Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Verdana, and a Signature font for signing documents.
The best PDF editor for Mac
Apple’s Preview app is built into macOS and offers a minimalist but valuable set of tools for marking up any PDF file. You won’t find a complete PDF edition here. But if you need a basic set of tools to highlight or redact text, take notes, or add comments to a document, you probably won’t need much more than what’s already available on your Mac.
The Preview markup tools are hidden when you open a PDF document for the first time. To see them, you’ll need to look for the small pencil icon that appears near the Spotlight search bar at the top of your PDF document’s toolbar. Clicking this displays a small set of tools that you can use to select text and add objects, text, or notes to your document.
The standout feature of the app is a signature tool that you can use to store a signature that you create using your trackpad or scanned with your Mac’s camera. You can then easily add that signature to a document by clicking the Preview Signature tool . Simple and easy to use once you set it up, Preview’s signature feature will prove its worth every time a digital document requires your John Hancock.
You can access all of Preview’s editing tools without opening Preview, as long as you’re running macOS 10.14 Mojave or later. Simply use QuickLook to view a PDF, then click the Markup button in that mode.
The best PDF editing interface
Readdle’s PDF Expert, exclusive to macOS, is a popular PDF editing tool that allows you to make changes to the text of existing PDF documents by removing and replacing images, updating text, and adding your own text. PDF Expert lacks OCR capabilities, so if you want to edit text on scanned documents, you’ll need to look beyond this program.
Of all the apps I tested, PDF Expert has the cleanest interface and was therefore the most pleasant to use. Two tabs appear at the top of the screen: Annotate and Edit. Clicking on one of them will give you a suitable selection of tools to perform annotation or editing tasks.
PDF Expert’s editing tools are impeccable. Click on the text in your PDF and the text editing tools will slide in so you can make changes. Select an image and tools to change the image will appear. You can move selected text anywhere on the page you want or delete it completely.
PDF Expert has problems with large documents; Otherwise, this would have been my top pick for Mac. However, every time he tried to open my nearly 450-page test file, PDF Expert would crash. Until this program behaves more reliably, look elsewhere if you tend to work with larger documents. There is also a Windows version in development and you can sign up to be notified when it’s ready.
The best PDF editor for OCR
PDFelement Pro from Wondershare is a full-featured PDF editor with an OCR engine for recognizing scanned text and a standard set of tools. With them, you can fill out forms, annotate documents, create and add signatures, and edit images within a document.
PDFelement had no problem opening anything I threw at it, including scanned documents, large files, and image-heavy PDFs. Once the documents are open, PDFelement Pro offers a fairly simple interface, with a set of tools on the left side of the document that are easy to understand. Simply select a tool and you can get to work making changes to a file.
Editing images, adding signatures, and using annotations in the app worked as planned, but I experienced some strange behavior when I was editing or adding text using PDFelement Pro. In particular, when I was editing existing text in a document, the app wanted to put the text in bold and it didn’t allow me to change the content to normal text. Also, when I added new text boxes, my own text didn’t display normally; the program always added a space after typing an apostrophe. And the program constantly played my Mac’s system beep while I typed. That’s annoying and not optimal.
How to choose the best PDF editor for you
The first question you should ask yourself when choosing a PDF editor is what you plan to do with it. If you’re just about marking up documents and adding digital signatures, PDF annotation software will suit your needs better.
As there are many PDF annotation software with good features available for free, you can save some money. For example, as we mentioned, Mac users can save even more time since the Preview app that comes with Apple computers includes markup and signing tools.
It also doesn’t cost much, or even anything, to create a PDF. You can do this from a Word document or a web page, and also convert a PDF to a Word document or JPEG.
However, if you are looking for a complete PDF editor that allows you to manipulate text and create documents, consider what kind of features you will need for PDF editing. Apps with good OCR capabilities will probably cost more, but if you don’t need OCR, you can settle for a free PDF editor.
While PDF editors are great for making changes or notes to documents, they are not necessary if you simply want to view and read a PDF. For that, check out our list of the best PDF readers you can download.
How we test PDF editors
We look at both PDF editors and applications used to annotate PDF files. All PDF editors can also annotate documents, but dedicated PDF annotation tools are not actually designed to make changes to the original content of a PDF document.
While testing each of these apps, we used a few different types of documents, including large files with a lot of text, documents with a combination of formatted text and images, and simple documents with text and images inserted into the document in a linear fashion. We test features like text recognition (when supported) and try to make changes to text, replace and add images, and add annotations.
For more information about our testing procedures, see this guide on how Jugo Mobile tests, reviews and rates products.
