10 Best PDF Editors of 2026

PDFelement takes the top spot because it covers almost everything a home or small office needs from a PDF editor at a price well below the market leader. Wondershare's Mac App Store listing describes editing that lets you add text, images, shapes and links, change fonts and colors, and add watermarks. It converts PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, HTML, RTF or images, in batches if needed, and its OCR reads scanned pages in 27 languages. You can build fillable forms, sign on any device, and send e-signable PDFs to several people. Protection includes passwords, search-based redaction and an automatic Smart Redact. On the US Mac App Store, Standard costs $59.99 a year and Pro $79.99 a year, and both come as one-time purchases at $79.99 and $119.99. The drawback is a confusing list of overlapping plans, with AI and Sign sold as extra monthly subscriptions, so read the tier names carefully before you buy.

Foxit PDF Editor is the strongest choice for people who want desktop editing on par with Acrobat but would rather not pay every month. Foxit's own page states that subscriptions start at $10.99 per user per month and that a perpetual license for Windows and macOS is a one-time fee of $209.99, with US list rates as of July 2026. The perpetual edition covers editing, conversion, OCR, forms, document security and fill-and-sign. The subscription plans add the AI Assistant for summaries, translation and extraction, cloud storage and Foxit's document management tools. PDF Editor+ costs $159.99 per user per year and adds the iOS and Android apps, AI Smart Redact and 150 eSign envelopes a year. The base plan limits signing to fill-and-sign, so anyone who sends contracts out for signature regularly should price Editor+ or a separate eSign service. It scores just below PDFelement on value because its entry price is higher for a single home user.

PDFgear is the clearest way to avoid paying for a PDF editor at all. Its Mac App Store listing says it offers free use of every function without trial watermarks or page counts, and its website describes free apps for Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android plus online tools that work without signing up. The feature list goes well beyond reading: you can edit text, images, shapes, signatures, links and form fields, convert PDFs to Word and other formats, and run OCR that turns scans into editable Word or TXT files in more than 30 languages. Page tools cover merging, splitting, rotating, adding and deleting pages, and you can compress and encrypt files. A built-in AI Copilot answers questions about a document. What you give up is the depth of a paid desktop suite: its feature list has no admin console, license management or audit trails of the kind offices buy Nitro or Foxit for. For most home tasks, that will not matter.

Adobe Acrobat is still the reference PDF editor, and many offices standardize on it because the format began at Adobe. The free Acrobat Reader already covers a lot: Adobe's App Store listing says you can open, read, fill in and sign PDFs for free, highlight text, add comments and open files from Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. Paid Acrobat plans add the tools people usually want an editor for: creating PDFs from photos and Office files, editing text and images, converting to Word, Excel or PowerPoint, combining and compressing files, reorganizing pages, OCR for scans and password protection. The AI Assistant can summarize documents and answer questions with citations, and Adobe labels it a paid feature that is free for a limited time. Adobe's pricing pages returned an access error from our location, so we could not verify a US price and score its value conservatively. If you only fill and sign forms, the free Reader may be all you need.

PDF Expert is the editor we would point most Mac owners to when ease of use matters more than price. Readdle's Mac App Store listing describes editing of original PDF text, where the font, size and opacity are detected automatically, so changes blend in. You can add and replace images, convert PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, TXT, JPG or PNG, recognize text in scans with OCR built on Apple's Vision framework, redact sensitive details and add password protection. Signatures sync between Mac, iPhone and iPad. The pricing page offers a yearly Premium plan covering iPhone, iPad and Mac, and a lifetime purchase for the Mac version only, both with a 30-day money back guarantee, though it showed prices in Polish zloty from our location, so the US price is pending. The limits are clear: there is no Windows or Android version, and the lifetime option skips mobile. Readdle says over 30 million people use its PDF Expert apps.

Xodo is a good fit if your PDF work happens in several places and you want to pay little for it. The pricing page lists three ways in: Xodo Web at $7.99 a month billed $95.88 a year, with more than 40 online tools and unlimited downloads; Xodo Desktop, the former PDF Studio, at $9.99 a month billed yearly, with more than 60 tools that work offline on Windows, macOS and Linux; and a Document Suite that bundles web, desktop and mobile. Desktop can also be bought as a perpetual license with one to three years of support. The free online tools cover occasional jobs but stop once you hit the daily limit. On iPhone and iPad, Xodo's app compresses, flattens, splits and crops PDFs, scans documents, fills and signs forms with Apple Pencil support, and converts Office and iWork files. Paying for several platforms separately adds up, so price the suite if you need more than one.

Nitro PDF Pro is aimed at small businesses that want a capable desktop editor with some admin control. Nitro's Mac App Store listing covers creating PDFs from any app, converting Word, Excel and PowerPoint to PDF and back, batch creation, and OCR that makes scans searchable. Editing reflows whole paragraphs, page tools insert, reorder, split and number pages, and review tools compare two versions of a document. Security includes permanent redaction, passwords, permissions and audit trails, and the Admin Console lets an owner reassign licenses. It connects to Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and SharePoint. On the US Mac App Store the annual subscription is $139.99, and Nitro offers a 14-day trial. Windows users can also buy Nitro PDF Classic, a three-year license, though its price showed only in euros from our location. For one person at home, PDFelement or Foxit offers similar tools for less.

Smallpdf is the simplest way to fix a PDF in a browser. Its pricing page lists more than 30 tools, from compression and conversion to merging, splitting, page numbering, cropping, redaction and watermarks, and the free plan lets you try them with a daily download limit. Pro removes the limits, adds text editing, OCR and stronger compression, unlocks AI tools for chatting with, summarizing and translating PDFs, and includes a Sign.com Premium subscription for e-signatures. The iPhone app scans documents with automatic cropping and OCR, and Smallpdf says uploaded files are deleted one hour after processing unless you save them. Because it works mainly online, it suits people who are comfortable uploading files and would rather not install software. The pricing page showed only euro prices from our location, so the US price is pending. Heavy users who edit long documents every day will get more from a desktop editor.

iLovePDF is the cheapest paid option on this list and a sensible choice if your PDF work is mostly organizing and converting files. The free Basic plan gives access to the essential tools with limited processing. Premium removes those limits, works across web, mobile and desktop, removes ads, adds digital signatures and workflows, and includes 2,000 AI credits. On the US App Store, Premium costs $5.49 a month or $44.99 a year. The tools cover merging, splitting, compressing, rotating, page numbers and watermarks, plus conversion from Office formats to PDF and back to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The phone app scans documents with OCR and lets you fill and sign forms with your finger. Students and academic staff can get a full year of Premium free. Its weak spot is editing existing text: the app focuses on annotations, drawings and added images, so anyone who rewrites PDF paragraphs needs a desktop editor.

Before you buy anything on a Mac, try Preview. It ships with macOS, and Apple's user guide shows it covers most everyday PDF chores. You can fill out and sign forms without a printer, with AutoFill for your details, and mark up documents by highlighting, underlining, striking out text and adding notes or speech bubbles. Page tools let you combine PDFs, add, delete or move pages, and crop or rotate them. You can lock a file with a password, reduce a PDF's size, and export to other formats. Files can live on the Mac or in iCloud. Where Preview stops is real editing: Apple's guide does not cover rewriting existing text, converting PDFs to Word or Excel, or running OCR on scanned pages, so anyone who needs those tasks should add PDFgear for free or a paid editor. It also only runs on a Mac, so Windows users should start with PDFgear instead.