Office & productivity

Free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

Find a free app for the parts of Adobe Acrobat you actually use.

Compare the free allowance and limitations on each app’s page. These are workflow alternatives, rather than identical copies.

Free options

Scan documents, recognise their text and arrange pages into searchable PDFs.

Free desktop app · GPL-2.0-or-later · No scan/OCR quota · Windows, macOS and Linux

Merge, split, rotate, crop and reorder PDF pages locally.

Free local PDF page tools · no upload or daily quota

Split, merge, rotate and extract PDF pages on your computer.

Free desktop page tools · no watermark or file-size cap

Create a PDF, add text and download the resulting document.

Free with ads · no daily or monthly limits stated · files processed online

Merge, split, compress and OCR PDFs offline.

Free for private and business use · no usage restrictions.

Annotate PDFs, fill forms and compare documents on your desktop.

Free MIT desktop toolkit · Windows and Linux.

Merge, split, convert and process PDF documents on your own server.

Self-hosted free PDF tools · Up to 5 users · Hosting costs separate

Read and edit PDF documents on your desktop.

Free open-source desktop software; local hardware required. Alpha release.

Merge, reorder and extract PDF pages locally with a command-line tool.

Free open-source software (Apache-2.0). No page quota; uses your computer.