A free PDF Expert alternative for Mac

Is PDF Expert free?

PDF Expert, made by Readdle, is free to download. The free version covers reading and basic markup. Editing tools, including changing existing text, are part of the paid plan. That is a fair model, and the paid app is good. It is just not free.

People searching "PDF Expert free" usually want one of two things: the paid features without paying, or something comparable that is actually free. We can help with the second.

What PDF Unlimited covers

All of this is free, with no watermark, ads or account:

• Annotate: highlight, underline, strikethrough, pen, shapes, sticky notes, text boxes.
• Sign: draw or type a signature, saved for reuse. See sign a PDF.
• Forms: click into fields and type. See fill out a PDF form.
• Pages: reorder, rotate, delete, duplicate, insert, merge and split.
• Compress with Low, Medium and High presets and a before and after size.
• OCR to make scans searchable, passwords, and true redaction.

What PDF Expert does that we do not

PDF Expert edits existing text and images in place. PDF Unlimited does not yet; you add text with text boxes instead. PDF Expert also runs on iPhone and iPad, while PDF Unlimited is Mac only. If either of those matters to you daily, PDF Expert's paid plan is a reasonable buy.

If you need to change original text only once in a while, a free tool like LibreOffice Draw can do it, with some layout quirks. Our roundup of free PDF editors covers when that makes sense.

Privacy and offline use

PDF Unlimited works fully offline and has no telemetry. Your documents stay on your Mac. There is no cloud account to create and nothing to sync unless you put the file in iCloud Drive yourself.

Ready to try it? Download PDF Unlimited. It runs on macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs.

Which one should you choose?

Choose PDF Expert if you edit the original text of PDFs often, work across iPhone, iPad and Mac, and are happy to pay for that convenience.

Choose PDF Unlimited if your work is signing, filling, marking up, assembling pages, compressing, making scans searchable and redacting, and you would rather not have another subscription. Plenty of people find that is nearly everything they ever did in a paid editor.

You can also use both. Install PDF Unlimited for everyday work, and keep a paid editor for the rare day you need to rewrite a paragraph.

Free trial, free tier, or free

These are three different things. A free trial lets you use everything for a while, then asks you to pay. A free tier gives you some features forever and keeps the useful ones for subscribers. Free means the whole app costs nothing. PDF Unlimited is the third kind: there is no paid version waiting behind it.

PDF Expert is a trademark of Readdle, and Adobe and Acrobat are trademarks of Adobe Inc. They are named here only to identify those products. PDF Unlimited is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.

Questions