In the world of digital files, Adobe's PDF is the one format to rule them all—the one that lets you exchange formatted documents with anyone, anywhere, using any operating system. Adobe invented Portable Document Format in 1993 and its Acrobat app long towered over all other options for viewing and managing PDFs. If you're a graphics professional, Acrobat is still your obvious first choice, offering tight integration with the company's class-leading graphics apps Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Rival programs—including our Editors' Choice for optical character recognition (OCR) ABBYY FineReader Pro—now provide a few conveniences that Acrobat lacks. But for corporate, small-business, legal, and academic users, Acrobat is still a powerhouse that earns our Editors' Choice award.

What Is Adobe Acrobat?

You can run Acrobat almost anywhere. It's a subscription-based app that you use can use on a Windows or macOS desktop or laptop, an Android or iOS phone or tablet, or in a browser thanks to a web-based version. Each is continuously updated, with different interface updates at different times. Many of Adobe's recent updates seem to emphasize high-tech razzle-dazzle instead of fixing long-standing limitations in the core functions of editing and managing PDF files (more on these limitations later).

For instance, Acrobat now has an AI Assistant which you can try a limited number of times and then, if you want to continue using it, subscribe for $4.99 monthly or $59.88 per year. The AI Assistant offers to summarize and answer questions about documents. It works well with documents by professional writers that are so clearly written that you don't need AI, but it's mostly useless with ordinary office-style reports and messages. A setting in the Preferences menu lets you turn off the AI Assistant button if you decide not to subscribe.

Another example is Acrobat's integration with Adobe Express, a new web-based tool for creating and editing PDFs, videos, and other media using templates and stock images provided by the company. Express resembles the desktop publishing programs popular years ago that let you assemble text and images into a document, but it incorporates video as well as images. It's worth considering as a publishing app, but it's mostly irrelevant to the functions that belong at the core of a PDF app.

Two kinds of PDFs exist, and working with their contents requires different tools. The first type are PDFs generated by modern apps like word processors and graphics editors. This is the kind most common in the corporate world and used for printing books, magazines, and newspapers. The second class of PDFs are created by scanners or cameras that saves images of printed documents ranging from restaurant receipts to whole books.

Acrobat is rich in corporate-class features for managing and sharing both kinds of files, especially in detailed graphics functions used for printing books and magazines. But it falls short in features designed to modify the contents of PDFs created by third-party apps and to make scanned or digitized PDFs more usable.

There are three versions of Adobe Acrobat. This review focuses on the flagship Acrobat Pro, but even the minimalist free version, Acrobat Reader, is worth having if you don't want or need the deluxe versions.

How Much Does Adobe Acrobat Cost?

Acrobat isn't cheap, even if you skip the AI add-on. Acrobat Pro costs $19.99 per month with a one-year commitment or a more affordable $239.88 annually if you pay for the year upfront. To use Acrobat Pro for macOS or Windows month to month with no commitment costs $29.99 per month.

A lesser version for Windows only, Acrobat Standard, costs $12.99 monthly with a one-year commitment, $22.99 monthly with no commitment, or $155.88 for a full year upfront. Compared to Pro, it lacks document comparison, redaction, and built-in OCR that converts scanned PDFs to editable documents. 

As a software reviewer, I get free review copies of many apps, but Acrobat Pro is one of the few that that I pay for year after year—even though I sometimes turn to other programs for features Acrobat can't match. If you don't like subscriptions, older, lower-featured permanent-license versions of Acrobat Pro 2020 and Acrobat Standard 2020 are available for $538.80 and $358.80 respectively. 

The free version, Acrobat Reader, is available for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. It lets you add comments to PDFs as the paid versions do, but not edit their contents. You can use two desktop or laptop copies of Acrobat with your account; it doesn't matter if the two are on the same or different operating systems. If you launch Acrobat on a third machine, you'll be prompted to log out of one of the two systems you already use.

Why Pay for Adobe Acrobat?

Why should you pay for a PDF app? After all, modern operating systems have built-in PDF viewing and markup software that let you draw arrows and circles or add text-only notes to existing PDFs. The Microsoft Edge browser does this under Windows, and Preview does the job on a Mac. 

A commercial app like Acrobat Pro adds OCR to convert scanned documents into searchable PDFs. It also adds redaction features, editing features that let you fix typos and replace images, file comparison for finding differences between versions, and PDF-signing features that let you create and process documents for others to sign. Acrobat Pro also lets you store documents in Adobe's proprietary cloud storage; cloud-based PDFs can be accessed by Adobe's mobile apps for advanced signing and editing functions.

Getting Started With Adobe Acrobat Pro

A subscription-based copy of Acrobat updates itself every two or three months. Two years ago, Adobe changed the app's name from Acrobat Pro DC to just Acrobat Pro. If you're a longtime user who never figured out that DC stood for Document Cloud, an online storage service that the company has since folded into its new Adobe Cloud, welcome to the club.

Acrobat takes some getting used to, because its interface isn't like anything else and its regular updates make it even less so. Other PDF apps tend to have a ribbon-style interface resembling that of the Microsoft 365 apps. Acrobat for Windows uses a hamburger-style menu icon at upper left that opens a drop-down menu with the usual file-saving and -managing features. On a Mac, you can open a similar menu from the standard macOS topline menu.

A Create button at the top of the window leads to a menu that lets you create PDFs from a scanner, by pasting text from the Clipboard, or by combining and converting PDF and other standard formats. The interface for combining PDFs is admirably simple; I use it all the time for jobs like combining monthly credit card statements into an annual file. Both versions recently added a menu of enhanced e-signing tools for distributing and managing PDF forms, but only the Windows app offers a Disable New Acrobat option that returns you to an earlier version of the interface if you prefer.

When you're merely viewing a PDF, Acrobat shows a standard toolbar with icons for viewing and sharing or selecting content. This toolbar used to appear outside the main document window, but recent versions put it inside the editing window, and I'm constantly dragging it out of the way when it hovers over a part of a document I want to read or edit. An optional right-hand pane in the main window displays a customizable list of other sets of tools for adding comments, editing, redacting text or images, scanning or OCR features, form creation and form filling, and more.

That right-hand pane lets you use a feature that's always been part of Acrobat but which I haven't found anywhere else: a page-numbering feature that lets you assign customized numbering to different parts of a document. For example, you can assign Roman numerals to a title page and table of contents, then Arabic numerals starting with 1 to the main content. Among other advantages, this lets you assign PDF page numbers that match the printed page numbers in a scanned book. Unfortunately, these custom page numbers won't display in PDF software from other vendors.

Viewing and Editing PDFs

When you view a PDF, Acrobat lets you split the window horizontally so one part of the file appears in the top pane and another part in the lower. Unlike other PDF apps I've seen, Adobe also has a Spreadsheet Split feature that works like a spreadsheet's "freeze panes" to keep the top row and left column visible while you scroll through the rest. This feature is mostly useful for viewing PDFs made from spreadsheets, but it might also keeping a map legend visible while you explore the rest of the map. 

Acrobat also offers a Reading view that hides most of the interface, but it lacks a view that displays only the unformatted text of a PDF as I've seen in Foxit PDF Editor Suite Pro. As in other PDF apps, you can drag and drop pages to reorder them and insert pages from other files and formats. For instance, you can drag a Word document into the thumbnail images of an existing PDF, and Acrobat will convert it into PDF format and insert it into the existing PDF pages.

The most technically difficult task a PDF editor ever performs is editing text in a scanned image. The editor first needs to run optical character recognition on the image, then insert, change, or remove the recognized text. Acrobat is alone in having a feature that lets you insert or change text in images scanned from old printed documents in the same font used in the document itself, even if that font has been obsolete for a century or more. Acrobat does this by building a custom font from the scanned text and using it for editing.

All other PDF apps use an up-to-date font from your computer when inserting text, making the resulting text look more like a ransom note than an old printed document. Acrobat's font creation works best when you perform OCR on a large enough section of text for the app to find all the letters it needs for the font, and its results aren't always perfect, but there's nothing else like it anywhere.

Unfortunately, Acrobat falls short in one essential feature you need both when editing scanned PDFs and ones created by other apps: When you add or remove text from a PDF, you may want to move some text or images to a different page. All other advanced PDF apps let you drag text or image elements from one page to another; Acrobat doesn't. You can work around the problem by cutting an element from one page and pasting it onto another, but you'll need to make fussy adjustments to the layout.

And one other essential feature is missing from Acrobat: a tool for splitting an image of a two-page spread (from a book or magazine) into two separate PDF pages. I've tried the workaround of cropping pages to extract the left- or right-hand page from a spread, but it's hopelessly awkward. Every other PDF app I've tried can split a page in two with a couple of clicks, and it's surprising that Acrobat still can't.

A Treasure Trove of Features

Go deep into Acrobat's interface and you'll find an astonishing wealth of options. The Comments toolset lets you write or draw almost anything on a file, and you can omit comments when you export the file. From the Prepare a Form tools, you can create a fillable PDF form either by modifying an existing PDF or Word document or by creating a form from scratch and adding text and fill-in fields from a toolbar. Advanced users and IT departments can apply JavaScript actions to form fields. An E-Sign toolset lets you mail out the form and collect responses via email or set up a tracking system that sends out multiple PDF copies and gathers comments and markups into your original. 

Acrobat also allows you to create a web-based form on the company's server, with a link that lets you add the form as a live page on your own website. You launch the form-creating process in Acrobat, but you create the form in a web browser using an Acrobat-like interface to upload an existing PDF or Microsoft 365 file. Then you add form fields and set up methods for sharing or tracking the form. Like other PDF apps, Acrobat offers full management features for creating and using digital signatures. 

Graphic designers seem to prefer Acrobat to its rivals for its uniquely powerful Preflight features that prepare files for professional printing and online display. Acrobat offers a long list of prebuilt operations for converting fonts and colors for specific print jobs, plus a troubleshooter that analyzes PDFs and suggests changes. I'm not a graphics pro, but I've used Acrobat's Preflight to fine-tune scanned PDFs to reduce file size without losing visual detail.

Adobe hasn't said anything about making Acrobat available on Apple's Vision Pro virtual-reality headset, but in the unlikely event that you want to manage PDFs from a Meta Quest or Meta Quest Pro, you can install a Meta version of the app and activate it with an existing Acrobat account or create a new account. I don't see this as part of my future, but maybe it's something you'll want to try (a VDF, perhaps?).

Scan and Deliver

One major feature of commercial PDF apps is their ability to use OCR to convert a scanned PDF into a searchable one and export it to a familiar editable format such as Microsoft Word or Excel. If you need this feature, you should experiment with the free trials of multiple PDF apps, because there's no way to predict which one will work best with the kinds of documents you use. Over the years, I consistently get the best results from the abovementioned ABBYY FineReader Pro, whose brilliantly powerful and efficient OCR editor lets you correct scanning errors at top speed. 

Acrobat's own OCR software comes close to FineReader's in accuracy and efficiency. If you've struggled with its awkward proofreading menu in older versions, you'll find proofreading far more efficent in the latest release. Foxit PDF Editor Pro uses a licensed version of the technology from an older version of FineReader with a more awkward interface than the one in the current FineReader version. 

Another high-end PDF app, Tungsten Power PDF Advanced, uses a licensed version of OmniPage's OCR technology that's less accurate than Acrobat's or FineReader's and has a clumsier interface. And yet another PDF app, Nitro Pro, integrates technology from I.R.I.S., which in my testing ranks even lower in power and convenience.

If you want to export a scanned PDF to a standard editable format, ABBYY FineReader is by far your best choice because of its many options for exporting with different levels of formatting, so you're more likely to get a document that isn't cluttered with random marks from a scanned image. If you have a PDF that wasn't scanned but created directly from a word processor or spreadsheet, any PDF app will do a serviceable job of exporting back to an Office format. But again, you should experiment with the documents that you normally use. One feature to keep in mind: Both FineReader Pro and Tungsten have a Watched Folder feature that automatically converts documents placed in that folder to PDFs.

For all its wealth of features, Acrobat sometimes surprises me by lacking one found in one or more of its rivals. For example, Acrobat has no whiteout tool for removing text or stray marks; Foxit and Nitro both have one. Like its competitors, Acrobat has a powerful redaction tool to remove text or graphics, but it takes more steps than seems necessary to simply remove some text. When you scan books, your scanned images might contain two facing pages. FineReader automatically splits those images in two; annoyingly, Acrobat doesn't, although some users report success with a KHKonsulting Page Splitter add-in that I haven't tried.

Less-Expensive Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat Pro

As I said, Acrobat isn't cheap, so you should consider alternatives before committing yourself to it.

Foxit PDF Editor Suite

The most impressive alternative I've found is Foxit PDF Editor Suite Pro, priced at $13.99 a month or $139.99 a year for a license that works on either Windows or macOS. A Foxit license is good for only one computer, however, not two as with Acrobat (though Teams versions are available). The Foxit app integrates with Microsoft's Azure Information Protection system and the iManage and eDocs digital management systems. It also has a text-only view that I haven't seen elsewhere. For me, Foxit's worst feature is its fuchsia-purple interface which can't be changed to a less annoying color. 

Tungsten Power PDF Advanced

Formerly known as Kofax, Tungsten Power PDF Advanced is attractively priced at $179 for a permanent license (no subscription needed). It includes a Watched Folder feature, and the many law offices that still use WordPerfect will value its option to export to that format. Like Acrobat, it lets you apply page numbering to thumbnail images so the thumbnail numbering matches that on the actual pages. Tungsten Advanced is Windows-only, but the company offers a $129 reduced version called Power PDF Standard for Windows or Power PDF for Mac.

Nitro PDF Pro

Nitro PDF Pro for Windows or Mac is also a one-time purchase priced at $179.99, though a Nitro Pro subscription version ($14.99 per month or $179.98 annually) adds e-sign as well as PDF functions. It's slightly less feature-packed than the above apps, with less effective OCR, but its Microsoft 365-like interface is easy to navigate.

Because PDF is an open format, you can find many other apps at various price ranges that may be worth trying.

Paparazzi!

It's hard to find an app that can create a PDF from a web page without inserting page breaks. In fact, I've found only one, available only on macOS: Paparazzi! (with exclamation mark). It's freeware, with donations accepted. If you know of a Windows equivalent, please let me know.

What about free online PDF editing? There are dozens of free cloud-based PDF services out there, but I'm reluctant to trust them with my data. I use Adobe's online services because Adobe is well-established, with enough high-powered clients to make me trust its security, but I really don't want to start sending my files to FlyByNightPDF when I don't know whether my documents will come back to me with hidden malware or spyware or be shared with some government dictatorship. If a site offers free PDF processing, it's worth asking what it might be getting in return.

Verdict: Acrobat Remains the Best PDF App

For most people, Acrobat Pro's enormous power, plethora of features, and deep integration with the universe of Adobe Creative apps make it an obvious pick. As such, it earns our Editors' Choice award for PDF apps, alongside our OCR favorite ABBYY FineReader Pro. If you already use FineReader Pro, you like won't find Acrobat necessary. But for academics, corporations, legal professionals, and small businesses, it's indispensable.