Best PDF Editor for Mac

Apple Preview is the default document and image viewer on macOS, offering a range of useful features beyond just viewing photos and PDFs.

Click on any PDF (or any image format) to open it and it will launch in Preview. Alternatively, open Preview and it will open the Finder, allowing users to browse through folders to locate the file they want to view. The app features a toolbar at the top of the screen, which allows users to view file details, zoom in or out, share the file, fill in a form, or mark up the file.

The Markup button reveals tools for selection, doodling, inserting shapes or sticky notes, signing, and typing text. These tools are easily customizable, allowing users to control the color and size of a shape or text box, as well as pick between multiple fonts when typing. There is also an autofill helper.

Apple Preview is not designed to replace image or PDF editors, but it still offers some power-user features. The menu bar’s Tools button allows users to reveal more advanced image controls, such as granular resizing, color adjustments, and automatic background removal. The File menu includes a Export button that allows users to choose the output’s quality and file format, allowing them to convert images to various formats.

When viewing a PDF file in Apple Preview, users can easily re-order or delete its pages using the sidebar, allowing them to limit the file to the important bits they need. If exporting the PDF using Preview, users can optionally add a password, quartz filter, or file restrictions.

If you’d prefer not to pay for Adobe Acrobat or another solution, Apple Preview may be more suitable for you. Apple Preview offers free tools that Adobe has paywalled, including PDF page organization/deletion, password protection for PDF files, and document scanning.

Just need to turn something into a PDF? Read: How to make a PDF on Mac

PDF Expert has a wide range of reliable tools and an intuitive user interface. It’s a great option if you are looking for more than Preview offers for free.

Upon launching PDF Expert, users are greeted by a Tools tab with shortcuts to various features, such as organizing, optimizing, protecting, reviewing, or converting documents. The app runs smoothly and gives you everything you need to fully control a PDF file, including edit text and images, sign, fill checkboxes, add links, redact content in multiple ways, insert shapes, highlight text, doodle, and even measure the distance between two points or calculate specific areas.

The PDF Expert toolbar features layout settings, an advanced search bar, and an AI Chat button. The AI Chat button allows users to interact with the integrated chatbot, summarize PDFs, list key points, generate hashtags, and more. The toolbar’s center includes commonly used PDF editing functionalities, such as annotation, editing, file conversion and exporting, signing, and optical character recognition (OCR).

For most users, PDF Expert’s features are sufficient, as it allows users to manipulate a document’s content, add or remove elements, protect the file with a password, and shrink its size. While Adobe Acrobat offers more advanced tools, PDF Expert’s core functionalities are sufficient for most users.

There are two payment options on macOS: a lifetime license, or an annual license that includes future updates and mobile support. Students can get 50% off and there is a free 7-day trial. It is available for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, but is not available on Android or Windows devices.

Wondershare’s PDFelement is a document manipulation tool that offers essential features on all platforms at a reasonable price. The app features a minimalistic user interface and offers single- and cross-platform licenses, with the main difference being app updates. If you plan to use the PDF editor on your Mac exclusively, you can opt for a one-year, two-year, or lifetime license. PDFelement also supports iOS, iPadOS, Windows, Android, and the web, offering an all-encompassing bundle that supports all of these platforms.

The single-platform licenses include 20GB of cloud storage, while the highlighted bundles offer 100GB. Once you run out of the 20,000 AI tokens included with your purchase, you can buy more. PDFelement features a clean home page showcasing standard PDF editing tools, such as PDF conversion, optical character recognition (OCR), template selection, file compression, and more. It also has a sidebar that grants access to handy destinations like recent files, cloud documents, tagged PDFs, and agreements you’ve sent others to sign.

PDFelement supports most commonly needed PDF editing functionalities, including text manipulation, image and URL insertion, adding, deleting, and editing the document’s pages. It’s not the most advanced selection out there, but it gets the job done in casual workflows. PDFelement is better suited for annotation and artificial intelligence needs, allowing users to insert text, shapes, comments, stamps, forms, checkboxes, text callouts, and more. It can also automatically bookmarks reflecting the document’s chapters.

Beyond text manipulation, PDFelement can redact text, add a password to the file, convert the PDF to a Microsoft Office format, change the pages’ background, compress the size, and insert a watermark. While not the most feature-rich PDF editor, it caters to casual users seeking a lightweight solution.

Despite its minimalism, getting used to PDFelement may take some time. The unlabeled buttons in the editor’s sidebar can be confusing and challenging to identify, and some features, like text editing, can sometimes be unpredictable. PDFelement is an excellent PDF editor for those with casual needs, but its tools aren’t as advanced as those offered by many rival apps.

Foxit offers a range of PDF-centric solutions for Mac users, including PDF Reader and PDF Editor. PDF Reader is available on macOS for free, allowing users to view, annotate, sign, and have AI analyze their documents. The paid-for PDF Editor unlocks the complete editing toolbox for an annual fee, with a base plan and a plus (+) plan that includes more features. There are options to pay monthly, but it is still an annual contract: there’s no option to cancel after a month. 

The free PDF Reader allows users to control the size, color, and style of inserted text or shapes, as well as customize features like changing the document’s background shade, reversing and rotating pages, signing forms, and more. It can read text aloud, measure distances, calculate areas, magnify selected spots, and have AI analyze your document.

The paid-for PDF Editor supports all of PDF Reader’s features but adds editing functionalities, such as file conversion, optical character recognition (OCR), and full manipulation of a document’s text and images through addition, deletion, or tweaking. It caters to power users with advanced features like document sanitization, redaction styles, security layers, JavaScript, and accessibility checks.

Foxit’s PDF Editor stands out for its ChatGPT integration, which can analyze and summarize documents and perform actions on your behalf. The base plan should suffice for most users, while the Plus plan offers exclusives like mobile app access, tracking other parties’ signatures, smart redaction, 130GB of cloud storage, and template support.

While the app is generally swift, the user interface may seem too packed to some users, especially those who don’t need all the offered tools. Foxit PDF Editor is designed for serious users rather than casual users, and if the UI overwhelms you, it may be an overkill for you.

Adobe Acrobat is a popular PDF viewer and editor on Mac, offering basic annotation tools. However, the free Acrobat Reader tier offers the same basic annotation tools that are present in Apple’s built-in Preview app, which is far superior in most cases. One point in its favor is that Acrobat is available across macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Windows, Android, and even the web, making it accessible from most modern computing devices, while Preview is limited to macOS. 

Subscribing to Adobe Acrobat Standard provides access to all PDF editing functionality, including more control over the PDF’s content, reorganization of the entire document’s layout, and more advanced tools like object measurements, accessibility preparation, JavaScript support, and search index insertion. 

For the advanced Adobe Acrobat Pro features you pay more each month to get permanent redaction, web form creation, PDF comparisons, accessibility checks, audio/video insertion, and much more. Acrobat Pro is necessary for tasks like converting scanned documents into searchable and editable PDFs.

Adobe Acrobat’s paid subscriptions are expensive and do not offer one-time purchase options. The slightly higher monthly ‘cancel anytime’ price is a good option if you only need the features temporarily. 

Other PDF editing apps offer optical character recognition (OCR) as an added perk, Abbyy FineReader PDF leads on its optical character recognition software and file converter, and, while it offers reliable OCR and file conversion functionalities, it falls short when it comes to PDF editing.

FineReader PDF is a simple user interface with three main tabs: viewing PDF documents, quick and advanced file conversion tools, and importing documents. It has been optimized for macOS and offers a modern design. FineReader PDF supports viewing and highlighting PDF files, with preset highlight colors and comments.

The quick conversion feature processes inputted files to detect content and then selects the output’s format. Supported file formats include PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, EPUB, FB2, TXT, HTML, RTF, ODT, and CSV. It doesn’t support Apple’s HEIC image format, so users may need to convert HEIC iPhone shots to JPG first. Each format offers its own customizations, such as ebook title, author, layout, and page size.

FineReader PDF exports the document, making it more editable. However, it doesn’t support proper PDF editing, so it may not be the ideal PDF solution for manipulating files.

It doesn’t offer a one-time purchase option and has relatively high recurring fees. There’s a yearly subscription plan on the Abbyy website, and a monthly subscription on the Mac App Store (which is a good option because you can cancel at any time). There’s a full-featured 7-day free trial.