Global Investor Experience: Download the Fees and Expenses Report

Maintaining independence and editorial freedom is essential to our mission of empowering investor success. We provide a platform for our authors to report on investments fairly, accurately, and from the investor’s point of view. We also respect individual opinions––they represent the unvarnished thinking of our people and exacting analysis of our research processes. Our authors can publish views that we may or may not agree with, but they show their work, distinguish facts from opinions, and make sure their analysis is clear and in no way misleading or deceptive.

To further protect the integrity of our editorial content, we keep a strict separation between our sales teams and authors to remove any pressure or influence on our analyses and research.

Read our editorial policy to learn more about our process.

Best PDF editors in 2023

The best PDF editors enable you to get even more done with PDF files but the real question is which PDF editor is best suited to your needs and workflow. 

Despite their finalized appearance, Portable Document Format files can be changed in the same way you alter a text document – you just need the right software. The best PDF editors let you open up almost any PDF file so that you can edit, alter, annotate, sign or convert it to other popular file formats including Microsoft Word. 

If you regularly work with PDF files as part of your job or in your free time then one of the best PDF editors will make things even easier for you. We’ve tested more than a half-dozen different options and these are the best ones for altering text, changing images and annotating PDF files. On a tight budget, these are the best free PDF editors.

1. Acrobat Pro DC

Best PDF editor for Windows

Cost: $240/year

Developer: Adobe

Compatibility: macOS, Windows

Category: PDF editor

Full-featured PDF editing and annotation tool

Excellent OCR

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 application meets that expectation.

Acrobat Pro DC offers a complete set of PDF-editing tools, and it even lets you edit scanned documents. Acrobat DC's OCR engine can convert scanned documents to text, which you can then search through and change. 

But Acrobat doesn't allow you to convert an entire document the moment you open it. Instead, the app waits for you to begin using the Pro DC's edit tools, recognizing and converting the pages as you select them for editing. Changing text in an OCR'd 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 with zero issues.

What I don't like about Acrobat Pro DC is the interface. It feels like a half-realized demo of what the app could be. Editing tools surround your document, and the UI feels disorganized, offering few options for customization. 

Since it's designed to work on both Macs and PCs, Acrobat Pro DC looks like it belongs in neither 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 your chosen OS.

2. PDF Candy

Best free PDF editor

Cost: Free

Developer: Icecream Apps

Compatibility: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Safari

Category: OCR, PDF editing, file conversion

Today's best pdfcandy deals

OCR capabilities

Extensive features for converting, creating files

Solid layout tools for PDFs

Limited text editing features

Our pick for the best free PDF editor is PDF Candy, because it offers something many free options do not — an OCR feature for scanning text. You can't edit OCR'd text in this web-based PDF editor, but you are able to upload PDF files and extract text and create a text document, RTF file, or Word document in both .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 pretty limited, the trade-off you make 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 of your documents in a queue so you can download them all at once after you've finished making changes to them.

3. PDFescape

Best PDF-annotation tool

Cost: Free; $36/year for premium account

Developer: Avanquest

Compatibility: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Safari

Category: PDF annotation

Today's best pdfcandy and pdfescape deals

Free online PDF editing

No registration required

Web-based annotation tools are easy to understand and use

Extremely limited font options when you add text

Desktop version requires a subscription

PDFescape is a basic, web-based PDF-editing and -annotation program you can use for free to work on PDF documents that are smaller than either 10MB or 100 pages, whichever is greater. (PDFescape used to limit you 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's also an "ultimate" plan for $72 per year.

Accessible through any modern web browser, PDFescape offers no OCR capabilities like PDF Candy does. But PDFescape's annotation tools are easy to use. You'll find a pretty solid set of standard annotation tools that can easily add, highlight and strike through text; insert notes; and otherwise mark up the pages of your PDF file. Using the web app's insert tools, you can also add new images and text to a document, white-out text, and add web links and form fields.

PDFescape does have some major limitations in adding new text. Because there are no OCR capabilities, you can't make changes to existing text; you're limited to adding new text to an existing document. Additionally, the app has very limited font options, as it doesn't use any of your computer's fonts. So you're limited to Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Verdana and a Signature font for signing documents.

4. Apple Preview

Built-in PDF annotation for macOS

Cost: Free with macOS

Developer: Apple

Compatibility: macOS

Category: PDF annotation

Excellent annotation tools

Easy-to-use signature capture

Markup features are often available in other apps

Locating annotation tools not obvious

Mac only

Apple's Preview app is built-in to macOS and offers a minimalist but valuable set of tools for marking up any PDF file. You won't find full-on PDF editing here. But if you need a basic set of tools for highlighting or redacting text, making notes, or adding comments to a document, you won't likely need much more than what's already available on your Mac.

Preview's markup tools are hidden when you first open a PDF document. To see them, you'll have 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 reveals a small set of tools you can use to select text and add objects, text or notes to your document.

The app's standout feature is a signature tool you can use to store a signature you create using your trackpad or scan using your Mac's camera. You can then easily add that signature to a document by clicking Preview's Signature tool. Simple and easy to use once you set it up, Preview's signing feature will prove its usefulness 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. Just use QuickLook to view a PDF, then click on the Markup button in that mode.

5. PDF Expert

PDF editor with the cleanest interface

Cost: $80 one-time license purchase

Developer: Readdle

Compatibility: macOS

Category: PDF editor

Clean, easy-to-use interface

AI-powered Enhance feature

Editing tools appear when you need them and hide when you don't

Difficulties with larger files

Mac-only

Readdle's macOS-only PDF Expert is a popular PDF-editing tool that allows you to make changes to text in existing PDF documents by removing and replacing images, updating text, and adding text of your own. PDF Expert lacks OCR capabilities, so if you want to edit text in scanned documents, you'll need to look beyond this program.

Of all the apps I tested, PDF Expert has the cleanest interface and therefore was the most pleasant to use. Two tabs appear at the top of the screen: Annotate and Edit. Clicking one of them gives you an appropriate selection of tools to perform either annotation or editing tasks.

PDF Expert's editing tools are flawless. Click text in your PDF, and tools for editing text will slide out so you can make changes. Select an image, and tools for changing the image appear. You can move selected text anywhere on the page you want or remove it altogether.

PDF Expert struggles with large documents; otherwise, this would have been my top pick for Mac. However, every time I attempted to open my nearly 450-page test file, PDF Expert hung. Until this program behaves more dependably, look elsewhere if you tend to work with larger documents. There's also a Windows version in development and you can sign up to get notified when it's ready.

6. PDFelement Pro

PDF editor with some quirks

Cost: $130/year

Developer: Wondershare

Compatibility: macOS, Windows, iOS, Android

Category: PDF editor

Opened and recognized text in every document

1 GB of cloud storage included

Lifetime license available

Bizarre text-editing behavior

Wondershare's PDFelement Pro is a full-featured PDF editor with an OCR engine for recognizing scanned text and a standard set of tools. With those, you can fill in 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 documents are open, PDFelement Pro offers a fairly simple interface, with a set of tools on the left side of your document that are easy to figure out. Just select a tool, and you can go to work making changes to a file.

Editing images, adding signatures and using annotations in the application all worked as planned, but I did experience some odd behaviors when I was editing or adding text using PDFelement Pro. In particular, when I was editing existing text in a document, the application wanted to make the text bold and would not allow me to change the content back to regular text. Also, when I added new text boxes, my own text did not display normally; the program always added a space after I typed an apostrophe. And the program constantly played my Mac's system beep as I typed. That's both annoying and not optimal.

7. Sejda PDF Desktop Pro

A PDF editor with too many limitations

Cost: $63/year

Developer: Sejda

Compatibility: macOS, Windows

Category: PDF annotation

Today's best pdfcandy, pdfescape and sejda deals

Can edit text, though on a limited basis

Can add images and annotate your documents

Paid weekly pass available

Very limited features

Paragraphs are treated as individual lines of text

Cannot remove or edit existing images

Sejda is a web-based PDF-editing application that works on any OS that has a modern web browser. A desktop version converts that web interface into something that runs on your computer. 

You can use a free version of Sejda, but it limits the number of daily tasks you can perform and the size of the documents you can access. 

To get the most out of the program, you can buy an annual license for both the web and desktop versions for $63. You can also buy a weekly pass for both versions for $8 if you've got a one-time project that requires Sejda.

Sejda has no OCR engine, so you can't use this app to edit PDF files created from scanned documents. You can edit only PDF files that already have selectable text.

To edit your PDF file, you upload it to the Sejda website and then use the toolbar at the top of the page to choose your tools. You'll find tools for editing text, adding links, adding form fields and images, and signing or annotating your document. All of Sejda's tools are rudimentary at best. 

The app breaks every line of text in your document into a single text entry, so you can't edit entire paragraphs of text. When you do edit existing text, remnants of the previous text often get left behind in the document. Sejda will let you add new images to a document, but you can't use the app to edit or remove existing images.

Sejda isn't a great app, but it works in a pinch when you need to make a quick change to an existing PDF document and you have no other tools at hand.

The first question you should ask yourself when choosing a PDF editor is what you plan to do with it. If it’s just to mark up documents and add digital signatures, PDF annotation software will better suit your needs.

As there are many well-featured PDF annotation programs that are available for free, you can save yourself some money. For instance, as we mentioned, Mac users can save even more time since the Preview app that ships with Apple’s computers includes markup and signature tools.

It also doesn’t cost much, or even anything at all, to create a PDF. You can do so from a Word document or a web page, and also convert a PDF to a Word doc or a JPEG.

However, if you’re in the market for a full-fledged PDF editor that lets you manipulate text and create documents, consider what kinds of features you’ll need for PDF editing. Applications with good OCR capabilities will likely cost more but if you don’t need OCR, you may be able to make do with a free PDF editor.

While PDF editors are great for making changes or notes to documents, they’re 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. 

We looked at both PDF editors and applications used for making annotations in PDFs. Every PDF editor can also annotate documents but dedicated PDF-annotation tools aren’t actually designed to make changes to any of the original content in a PDF document.

While testing each of these applications, we used a few different types of documents including large, text-heavy files, documents with a mix of formatted images and text and simple documents with text and images inserted into the document in a linear fashion. We tested features like text recognition (when supported) and we tried making changes to text, replacing and adding images and adding annotations.

For more on our testing procedures, check out this guide on how Tom’s Guide tests, reviews and rates products. 

Round up of today's best deals

Einstein GPT gives Salesforce unifying vision for high-profile acquisitions

Salesforce is bringing the power of generative AI to all its offerings, showing that its multi-billion-dollar acquisitions in recent years can create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s no secret to anyone that generative AI is the hot new thing in tech right now, promising to revolutionize the way humans interact with software. And, perhaps uniquely, it is a potentially transformational technology that won’t require rebuilding the infrastructure stack.

Salesforce is one a rising wave of software companies betting on the promise of generative AI. But in Salesforce’s case the bet appears to be big — and one that may finally tie together its disparate, high-profile acquisitions over the past few years in ways that could shed light on the company’s long-term vision for how its customers will make use of its full slate of offerings.

At its Salesforce World Tour NYC and Tableau Conference events earlier this month, the company unveiled a slew of new generative AI improvements and offerings for Sales Cloud, Slack, and Tableau. In collaboration with partner Accenture, Salesforce also announced a generative AI for CRM acceleration hub that will help customers scale their generative AI efforts.

“We’re thinking about how we can better utilize AI to support a sales organization in terms of creating the right strategies to approach customers,” says Juan Perez, who joined Salesforce as CIO in 2022 after more than 30 years at UPS in various technology leadership roles, including CIO and chief information and engineering officer. “How can we take that great, trusted data that we have and simplify the way in which account executives are positioning a deal in front of a customer, are positioning a solution in front of a customer?”

Gerry Murray, research director of marketing and sales technology at IDC, believes Salesforce is right on trend, noting a genuine appetite for AI in search and social services, along with enterprise cloud applications.

“Generative AI and prompt-based UIs are going to become de facto capabilities for marketers and marketing systems,” Murray says. “As the example of ChatGPT’s record-setting growth to 100 million monthly users in only two months shows, people naturally understand and prefer dialogue-based ways to interact with information.”

Generative AI is a set of algorithms that use training data to generate new content (text, images, audio, or video). ChatGPT, perhaps the most well-known generative AI application to date, is a chatbot built on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 large language models (LLMs). Like other generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) applications, it can draw on its neural network model to ask and answer questions, summarize information, and even write code.

Enterprises have been adopting the technology of late, though cautiously, including early returns on GPT-based endeavors by Unilever and CarMax, among others.

In March, Salesforce launched Einstein GPT, a generative AI CRM technology that combines Salesforce proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud. Einstein GPT ingests and unifies a company’s customer data and can then connect it to OpenAI’s models or their own model, enabling their Salesforce CRM instantiation to perform actions such as generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers.

Earlier this month, Salesforce added Einstein GPT for Service to help service teams generate responses to customers, automate knowledge article creation, and auto-generate case wrap-up summaries. Salesforce also unveiled Slack GPT, which enables generative AI app integrations to power capabilities such as conversation summaries and writing assistance in Slack. It also ties in with Einstein GPT to turn Slack into the conversational interface for Customer 360. The company views generative AI to be a key priority for senior IT leaders and has set aside $250 million for AI startup investment.

At Tableau Conference last week, Salesforce introduced Tableau GPT, powered by Einstein GPT, and the complementary Tableau Pulse offering. Tableau GPT changes the way users interact with Tableau, enabling them to use natural-language prompts to generate visualizations. Tableau Pulse, powered by Tableau GPT, is intended to personalize the user experience of interacting with Tableau, using AI to anticipate the data the user needs and automatically generating actionable insights.

“There are many use cases for generative AI, including creating text, image, and video brand assets, personalizing marketing at scale, and conducting conversational interactions with customers across channels,” IDC’s Murray says. “But the use case that will change the way we interact with computers is prompt-based UIs.”

Murray says users will be able to describe what they want the app or system to do, get recommendations from the AI, and create what is essentially a reusable, extensible script for a use case. Users can perform quality assurance on the script by watching the AI make the necessary menu calls and user interface clicks in a sandbox environment. Once the users are confident in how well the script works, they can put it into production.

“Prompt-based user experience is a killer app for AI because it scales and is highly observable, which will raise familiarity and trust with AI systems in general,” Murray says. “It will also end up documenting in great detail how work gets done around the enterprise and free human resources from the tedium of click-based process automation and analytics.”

One of the criticisms of Salesforce in recent years is that it has been slow to show how its string of multi-billion-dollar acquisitions in recent years fit together in a cohesive whole. It acquired Mulesoft for $6.5 billion in 2018, Tableau for $15.6 billion in 2019, and Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021. Some activist investors started questioning the pace of the company’s spending. The questions started taking on additional weight earlier this year when Salesforce laid off about 10% of its workforce and then disbanded its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) committee, saying it would focus on its existing business.

But these latest announcements from Salesforce begin to show how the whole might be greater than the sum of its parts, with Salesforce as a central repository for all data around a customer, Mulesoft connecting to other data sources and aiding process automation, Tableau providing insights, and Slack as the interface that surfaces the data and provides for interaction between sales teams, marketing teams, and customers.

“I’m proud to say that in the last year, almost every product that we’ve released has been a join product — you have to squint in some cases to see the Mulesoft technology,” says Brent Hayward, CEO and general manager of Mulesoft.

IDC’s Murray says that like its enterprise cloud application peers, Salesforce has found the work of building a common architecture for all its cloud applications is a heavy engineering effort.

“To be fair, the Salesforce acquisitions are still five or fewer years old and moving/merging mountains of code is a long process,” he says. “We expect Salesforce to continue its integration and interoperability efforts, especially with respect to prompt-based UIs and AI for engagement, automation, analytics, and data management because brands need to solve for continuity across the diverse array of interactions they have with customers.”