Adobe Acrobat Reader
View, sign, collaborate on and annotate PDF files with our free Acrobat Reader software. And to easily edit and convert your PDFs into file formats like Excel and Word, try out PDF editor and converter Acrobat Pro DC.
License model
- Freemium • Proprietary
Application types
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
Features
- PDF annotation
- Edit PDF
- Fill PDF Forms
- Document Annotations
- Create PDF files
- Combine PDF
- Dark Mode
- Sign PDF files
- Multi-tabs
- Lightweight
- OCR
- No registration required
- Invert colours
- Highlighter
- Works Offline
- PDF compression
- Text Highlighting
- Export to PDF
- Print to PDF
- Cloud Sync
- Split PDF files
Adobe Acrobat Reader News & Activities
Recent News
- Maoholguin published news article about Adobe Acrobat DC
Adobe introduces new AI assistant in Acrobat to chat and interact with your own documentsAdobe has introduced an AI Assistant feature in Acrobat, aimed at simplifying navigation in extensi...
Recent activities
POX added Adobe Acrobat Reader as alternative to Jumpdf
morganredacts added Adobe Acrobat Reader as alternative to Redactable- Fruidy rated Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Alter reviewed Adobe Acrobat Reader
Acrobat Reader is the lite version of Acrobat Pro which has been stripped down to the bone, left with no useful features yet still bloated because Adobe never bothered to optimize it (why, they just wanted you to cough up the subscription fee for Pro version). If you need a basic reader that only reads, go for Sumatra PDF -- it's lightweight, works fast, and supports more file formats than its name initially suggested. If you want to edit and annotate, I would recommend Foxit... or not. Maybe a...
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RoxyCole added Adobe Acrobat Reader as alternative to Sonic PDF- veneno_ liked Adobe Acrobat Reader
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Adobe Acrobat Reader information
AlternativeTo Category
Office & ProductivityApple AppStore
- Updated Aug 12, 2024
- 4.69 avg rating
What is Adobe Acrobat Reader?
View, sign, collaborate on and annotate PDF files with our free Acrobat Reader software. And to easily edit and convert your PDFs into file formats like Excel and Word, try out PDF editor and converter Acrobat Pro DC.
Annotate PDFs from anywhere.
Do more than just open and view PDF files. It's easy to annotate documents using sticky notes, type text directly onto the page, add bookmarks, highlight, underline, or use strikethrough tools, and even draw on the screen with a freehand drawing tool.
Connected to the Cloud for easy file access.
Acrobat is connected to Adobe Document Cloud, so you can work with your PDFs from anywhere. You can even access and store files in cloud storage solutions like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive.
Take your PDFs to go with the Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app.
This free PDF reader app lets you view, comment, fill out, and sign PDF forms to help you move through your workflow quickly and efficiently.
Read text out loud for hard to read documents.
The read text out loud option helps guide you along any document that’s challenging to read.
Comments and Reviews
Great for PDF editing and annotation.
The paid version is wonderful but would wish that a few of the key features were also available on the free version - otherwise my favourite PDF software.
Acrobat Reader DC is almost certainly the worst PDF document reader out there, which is pretty ironic as it's the one by the same company that also created and maintains the format. It's one of the prime examples why a site like alternativeTo is great to have, because most people will, sooner or later, be looking for a way to avoid having to use it.
Functionality in the read-only free version is severely limited. It doesn't include even the most basic editing and reorganisation tools. Thousands of simplistic scripts allow you to extract, inject, reorder, rotate pages etc. from the command-line, and there are numerous free web applications that offer much more advanced editing capabilities. Filling out forms or signing documents is about as far as Reader DC's feature set goes.
It's also incredibly slow. Compare opening a large document in Acrobat Reader to the already more bloated alternatives such as Nitro Reader or Foxit Reader – it commonly takes several times as long to just get the document to display. The difference is even more extreme when compared to more basic readers such as eVince and Okular.
But now that you have the document on your screen, that's where the problems only really start. Have you ever tried scrolling through a large document with pictures in Acrobat Reader? Better forget about it! Give your mouse scroll wheel a slight spin, and spend the next ten seconds watching the document slowly inch its way down – without any possibility of stopping it if you overshoot your target. Even if you scroll the wheel back up, you'll have to wait until Reader has recovered, and then can have another shot at aiming for the spot you wanted to scroll to. Even the JavaScript-based PDF renderers of modern browsers are usually faster in comparison. It baffles my mind how the code can be so poorly optimised as to make scrolling through a document completely overwhelm a quadcore, 64-bit machine with 32 GBs of RAM. It takes quite some guts to release a piece of software in this condition, and it's inexplicable how a company as big as Adobe seemingly can't find good engineers to fix it. (And before you ask, this is not a problem with my system. I've tried using Acrobat Reader on a variety of machines, from laptops to high-end workstations, across several versions of Windows and Mac OS, and it's the same everywhere).
Then comes the cherry on top, the fact that Adobe doesn't manage to produce a reader that is compatible with the document format they developed and maintain in-house. Forms and layouts can get messed up, fonts are occasionally not rendered properly, and so on. I'll admit that quite possibly all other readers have that kind of problem, too, but I'd have expected a higher level of compatibility from what's supposed to be the "official" PDF reader. It's true that if you have a PDF that uses a lot of special and advanced features, your chances of opening it are highest with Acrobat Reader. Did you know, for example, that PDFs can be deployed as full-screen applications with scripting and 3D content? You might actually be able to write a pretty advanced computer game as a PDF file. I tend to disable those active content features in the program's settings for security reasons, especially considering Adobe's less-than-stellar reputation in that aspect. But if you need any of that functionality, there might not be a way around Acrobat Reader.
Let's assume for now that you were lucky and got your document to display properly on screen. Chances still are it won't print that way.
Adobe's PDF printing has turned into a running joke among students during my studies. We've had it all, from ROT-1 printing (each letter on a document was rotated by one, so if the document said "chapter 15", the resulting printout would read "dibqufs 26"), to mix-ups in the order of pages, intermittent blank pages, to corrupted images. Images are especially fun, because the results will range from completely messed up, to blocky and full of aliasing effects, to seemingly right but with terrible contrast or hue shifts. Again, all of this persists across platforms, printers, printer drivers etc. and are clearly Reader problems, not specific to a particular configuration.
There are many other, persistent bugs. Looking them up usually reveals this pattern: the issue has been reported numerous times over many years, people are discussing them in forums, sometimes they're even acknowledged by an official Adobe representative – but they're not being fixed. Some very severe bugs and major issues I've found had been reported for sometimes up to 10 years, yet they were still included in every new major version of Reader. One of my favourites was the one that made Reader freeze for about half a minute every time it was opened, in case the list of recently opened documents contained a file on a network location that was no longer accessible. I'm not actually sure if this has been fixed now after all, but it's been annoying me for the better part of five years. I sometimes wonder if anyone is even still working on fixing this thing.
To wrap up with something more positive: Reader is very customisable and offers many options. In an age where most software is being excessively dumbed down, as potentially slightly confusing a few less tech-savvy people is apparently worse now than no longer doing the job for the other 99,9%, Acrobat Reader DC feels refreshingly powerful. It allows you to set numerous preferences to your heart's content, allowing you to use it pretty much exactly the way that is most comfortable and productive for you. It feels like a true desktop application, developed for desktop users, who want to do actual work and use a real computer – none of that touchscreen-optimised toy thing for people who just muck about on YouTube and Instagram all day =) I feel like that deserves some respect, and is one of the reasons why, despite everything, Acrobat Reader still gets set up on all my systems.
[Edited by Anamon, February 18]
I do a lot of PDF remediation for accessibility, & noticed years ago that Adobe's export filter for MS Office produces poorer results than Microsoft's native PDF export capability.
Reply written Sep 10, 2023
Acrobat Reader is the lite version of Acrobat Pro which has been stripped down to the bone, left with no useful features yet still bloated because Adobe never bothered to optimize it (why, they just wanted you to cough up the subscription fee for Pro version). If you need a basic reader that only reads, go for Sumatra PDF -- it's lightweight, works fast, and supports more file formats than its name initially suggested. If you want to edit and annotate, I would recommend Foxit... or not. Maybe a decade ago, but not now, it has gone down the Adobe path in addition to being a bundleware. PDFgear is the next best thing I can found, although functionality wise it's still a bit lacking and needs more development to catch up with the more established names out there.
The only useful software for printing at scale.
Otherwise a disaster, especially since the user interface was changed (2024).
Even though adobe developed the PDF format, it's the worst PDF reader out there. It loads painfully slow, constantly complaining about its background spyware component being disabled, confusing and annoying UI and still lacking Linux support. What a shame!
A rather cumbersome program. Imperfect minimalism, constant tracking, pervasive reminders of the latest version, and lagging from version to version. But there is an option to synchronize with most popular cloud storages and some local functions between devices, still a nice interface compared to other alternatives.