The best PDF editor software of 2026

Adobe Acrobat is the editor the rest of this list gets compared with, and the best reason to pay for it is the people on the other end. Your clients, lawyers and accountants probably open files in Acrobat or the free Acrobat Reader, so the forms, comments and signatures you add show up the way you left them.

Adobe sells three plans. Standard costs $14.99 a month on a yearly plan billed monthly ($24.99 month to month) and covers editing text and images, converting files and requesting e-signatures. Pro costs $19.99 a month on the same yearly terms ($29.99 month to month) and adds the tools office work tends to need sooner or later: redaction for removing names and account numbers, comparing two versions of a contract, and OCR that turns a scanned page into text you can search and edit. Studio, at $24.99 a month yearly ($34.99 monthly), is Pro plus Adobe's AI Assistant and Adobe Express Premium.

Read the cancellation terms before you pick a billing option. On the yearly plan billed monthly, cancelling after the first 14 days costs up to half of what is left on the year, and the prepaid yearly plan is non-refundable after 14 days. If you need Acrobat for one project, pay month to month.

The free tools are limited. Acrobat Reader opens and views files, and Adobe's free online editor lets you add text boxes, comments and drawings, though it will not change text that is already in the PDF. Pro comes with a 7-day free trial.

Foxit PDF Editor, sold for years as Foxit PhantomPDF, handles the jobs most offices buy Acrobat for at a lower yearly price. PDF Editor costs $129.99 per user a year and runs on Windows, Mac and the web. PDF Editor+ costs $159.99 a year and adds the iPhone, iPad and Android apps, Smart Redact, which uses AI to find sensitive details for you to remove, and 150 Foxit eSign envelopes a year for sending documents out to be signed.

OCR turns scans into searchable text, and shared reviews let several people comment on the same file. Foxit's AI Assistant can chat about a document, summarize it and build bookmarks, with 300 free credits a month included in PDF Editor.

Foxit is one of the few big names that still sells a one-time license. Foxit PDF Editor 14 costs $209.99 per user, which pays for itself against the yearly plan in under two years if you do not need new versions. Monthly billing starts at $10.99, though the pricing page does not say which plan that price buys. Foxit gives you 14 days to try it, and the PDF Editor+ trial needs no card.

Nitro PDF suits small and mid-sized businesses that want one editor rolled out to a team, with an admin portal and someone to call when it breaks. Nitro PDF Standard starts at $15 per user a month in the US, billed yearly. It includes creating, converting and combining PDFs, editing, comments and sharing, team management through the Nitro Admin portal, AI tools, and support around the clock every day of the year. It runs on Windows and Mac, with an iOS app for iPhone and iPad.

Nitro has long pitched itself to offices moving off Acrobat, and its security paperwork is aimed at the same buyers: Nitro lists SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification and HIPAA compliance. If you also send contracts for signature, Nitro Sign is a separate product from $10 per user a month, billed yearly.

You can buy up to 20 licenses on Nitro's site, and larger teams go through sales for volume prices on Nitro PDF Plus. Every subscription is billed yearly, so there is no cheap way to use Nitro for a single month. Nitro PDF Classic, a one-time payment for a three-year license on Windows, is the option for teams that dislike subscriptions, but Nitro does not publish its price. The free trial lasts 14 days and needs no card.

PDFelement from Wondershare is the budget choice for people who want a full desktop editor without Acrobat's price. You can create, edit, read, print and sign PDFs, organize pages and protect files with a password, and every paid plan includes free tech support.

Read the pricing carefully. Wondershare's store was running a sale on November 4, 2026, with a single-platform yearly plan at $79.99 (listed at $129) and a cross-platform yearly plan, which adds the iOS and Android apps and the web, at $89.99. Both of those renew automatically. Cheaper yearly plans that you renew by hand ($31.99 and $41.99), quarterly plans and perpetual licenses sat on the same page, and paid plans come with between 20 GB and 100 GB of PDFelement Cloud storage. Expect the numbers to move, and check whether the plan you pick renews on its own.

The 14-day trial lets you try almost everything, but it puts a watermark on every file you save, and it leaves out OCR and compression, so you cannot test how PDFelement handles your scanned documents before you pay. Paid plans include 50 AI uses; more needs a separate AI add-on.

PDF Expert from Readdle is the editor to pick if you work on a Mac, iPhone and iPad and want an app that behaves like it was made for them. One account works across your Apple devices, and you can buy it through the Mac App Store and the App Store as well as from Readdle.

The paid Premium level adds the editing most people download it for. You can change text, images and links, redact, fill in forms that include checklists and calculations, add your signature, run OCR so scanned pages become searchable, and convert PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and JPG. Readdle's PDF Copilot adds AI for explaining what a document says.

Readdle sells a yearly plan that covers the Mac, iPhone and iPad apps, and a lifetime license for the Mac app only. Both come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Readdle's pricing page shows prices by region, so check the US price there before you buy.

PDF Expert does not run on Windows. Readdle points Windows users to PDF Copilot on the web instead, so if anyone on your team uses a PC, choose Foxit or Acrobat and keep everyone on the same tools.

Smallpdf is a Swiss set of more than 30 PDF tools that run in your browser, and it is the one to bookmark if most of your PDF work is compressing, converting, merging and signing. You drop a file on the page, pick a tool and download the result. There is also a Windows app and mobile apps for iOS and Android.

The free plan lets you add text, shapes, images, highlights and sticky notes and rearrange pages, with a limit on how many documents you can download. Changing text that is already in the PDF needs Smallpdf Pro, which also brings OCR, stronger compression, the AI tools and unlimited downloads. Pro includes a Sign.com Premium subscription for sending documents out to be signed, and Team plans cover 2 to 19 seats.

Pro comes with a 7-day free trial, and if you cancel during it your account goes back to the free plan. Smallpdf shows prices by region, so check the US price on its pricing page before the trial ends.

Smallpdf processes files on its own servers over TLS encryption, and it lists ISO/IEC 27001 certification and GDPR compliance. That is reassuring for everyday files, but a cloud tool is the wrong choice for documents your company says must stay on your own computers.

Sejda is the best free option for someone who needs to fix a PDF now and then. Its web editor changes text that is already in the file, adds new text and images, fills in and signs forms and whites out content you want gone, all in the browser without signing up. The free web version allows 3 tasks an hour, and Sejda says it deletes files from its servers after processing them.

If you would rather keep files on your own computer, Sejda Desktop has the same tools and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. The free desktop version allows 3 tasks a day, on documents up to 50 MB and 200 pages, with OCR on files up to 10 pages.

Paid plans remove those limits. A Web Week Pass gives you seven days and does not renew, Web Monthly renews each month, and Desktop+Web Annual adds the desktop app. Paid users can upload files up to 500 MB and run OCR on up to 100 pages. Sejda shows prices by region, so check the US figure on its upgrade page.

For a freelancer fixing a typo on an invoice or a parent filling in a school form, the free web editor is often all you need, and the one-week pass covers a busy stretch without a subscription.

Power PDF is for people who want to pay for a PDF editor once and keep using it. Earlier versions were sold as Nuance Power PDF and then Kofax Power PDF, and the product now comes from Tungsten Automation. Standard costs $129 for Windows or Mac. Advanced costs $179 for Windows and adds e-signatures, batch processing, Bates numbering, advanced redaction and password protection.

Those three editions are perpetual licenses: you keep the version you buy, but Tungsten says they include no updates or upgrades, so a future version means paying again. The Windows editions run on Windows 8.1, 10 and 11, including ARM machines, and work inside Microsoft Office. A free Power PDF Mobile app covers iOS and Android.

Bates numbering stamps a running number on every page of a document set, which law offices use when they exchange files in a case. Teams of five or more can get Power PDF Business, a subscription with updates, extended support, a browser-based Cloud Editor and a Microsoft Teams app, through a quote. The free trial lasts 15 days, needs no card and can only be installed once.