PDFgear vs PDF Unlimited: a fair comparison for Mac

PDFgear in brief

PDFgear is a free PDF editor for Mac, Windows and mobile. According to its developer, the Mac app is completely free, adds no watermark, shows no ads, and works without registering or signing in. It edits existing text, runs OCR, converts PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and image formats, compresses files, signs, fills and creates forms, and redacts.

It also has a built-in AI assistant for summarizing documents and answering questions about them. PDFgear says its AI features and online services require an internet connection.

Where PDFgear is the better pick

It is fair to say this clearly. If you need to change the original words in a PDF, PDFgear does that today and PDF Unlimited does not yet. The same goes for converting PDFs to Office formats, building fillable forms, and AI summaries. PDFgear also supports older Macs, back to macOS 10.14 per its developer, while PDF Unlimited needs macOS 14 or later.

Where PDF Unlimited is different

PDF Unlimited is built for people who want a PDF app that never goes online. It has no AI features, no cloud services and no telemetry, so there is no setting to check and nothing to opt out of. Your documents stay on your Mac by design.

It is a native Mac app built with SwiftUI and Apple's PDFKit, the same framework behind Preview, and it is universal for Apple silicon and Intel. The toolset is deliberately focused: Read, Annotate, Sign, Pages and Redact modes, plus combine, compress with before and after sizes, OCR, password protection and flattening.

Which should you choose?

In our opinion, it comes down to two questions. Do you need to edit original text or convert to Word? Choose PDFgear. Do you want the simplest possible privacy story, with nothing ever leaving your Mac? Choose PDF Unlimited. Both are free, so trying both costs nothing.

Download PDF Unlimited, or see the wider field in our best free PDF editors for Mac.

PDFgear is a trademark of its owner, 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.

Using both

Nothing stops you from keeping both installed. Both read and save standard PDF, so annotations, form entries and signatures made in one open in the other. A common setup is to make PDF Unlimited the default for everyday reading, signing and page work, and open a file in another editor on the rare day you need to rewrite a sentence. In the Finder, Control-click a PDF and choose Open With to pick the app for that file.

Questions