PDFgear icon
PDFgear icon

PDFgear

Read, edit, convert, merge, and sign PDF files across devices, for completely free and without signing up.

PDFgear screenshot 1

Cost / License

  • Free
  • Proprietary

Application type

Platforms

  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Online
  • Android
  • iPhone
  • Android Tablet
  • iPad
Edit PDF
Annotate PDF
+2
Convert PDF
PDFgear alternatives  
79likes
94alternatives
1article
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Features

Properties

  1.  Lightweight
  2.  AI-Powered
  3.  Distraction-free
  4.  Support for Themes

Features

  1.  Combine PDF
  2.  Ad-free
  3.  Split PDF files
  4.  No registration required
  5.  OCR
  6.  Works Offline
  7.  PDF annotation
  8.  PDF compression
  9.  Dark Mode
  10.  Sign PDF files
  11.  Fill PDF Forms
  12.  Full-Text Search
  13.  PDF encryption
  14.  E-signature
  15.  Text to Speech
  16.  Crop PDF
  17.  No Tracking
  18.  AI Chatbot

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Adobe Acrobat DC icon
Adobe Acrobat DC

Create and edit PDFs. Collaborate with ease. E-sign documents and collect signatures. Get everything done in one app, wherever you work. Acrobat’s got it. Stay on top of your documents with powerful features for desktop, mobile, ...

 
Learn More

Comments and Reviews

   
Comment summary: PDFgear earns strong praise as a free, ad-free PDF reader and editor with a modern or feature-rich interface, broad functionality, and a compelling alternative to Acrobat’s subscriptions. Users value its zoom behavior, usability, and time and cost savings. Reported limitations include separate windows instead of tabs, weak or absent document OCR, unreliable AI summaries, poor compression performance, no Linux support, and—according to one Mac review—limited editing and compression issues. UI opinions vary by platform.
Top Positive Comment
Farrukh
4

One great feature I immediately appreciated about it is that it doesn't reset its zoom setting when you click on a bookmark. This was an issue I encountered with Acrobat, PDF-Xchange, and Foxit Reader, where setting the zoom level to page width would reset to full page view when clicking on another bookmark.

Negatives: So far, I have only found two drawbacks:

  1. It opens each document in a separate window instead of supporting multi-tab functionality.
  2. Some users have criticized its AI.

Overall, it is an excellent free PDF software and a top alternative to popular PDF readers like Acrobat, Foxit Reader, and PDF-Xchange.

Top Negative Comment
Sam Lander
1

The AI or the way it interacts with the document is horrible. It makes things up constantly. I will read a page and then ask it to summarize it, and it will summarize something completely different.

freakqnc
0

Close but no cigar. Can't edit PDF and compared to Acrobat DC is way far from it. Mac version compression doesn't work and yields file sizes larger than the original making it entirely useless.

Sequester3480
0

Best free PDF editor, converter, manager, etc. I use it on macOS and while the UI looks like a 1990s Windows app, the feature set is amazing and just plain works. Stop trying to search everywhere for alternatives, I am so freaking satisfied with this, it’s a lifesaver. Would be nice if it had some new macOS Liquid Glass type UI polish but if you’ve used MS Office on Windows you’ll feel right at home.

KimiBCN
1

It's the closest thing I've found to Acrobat Pro. However, it lacks OCR functionality for PDF documents. It's also not open source and doesn't have a Linux version. But it's feature-rich and allows you to get by with PDF editing.

Sequester3480
Replying to @KimiBCN

I’ve used its OCR on many PDFs. Works fine for me. I can choose which pages of the PDF to run OCR on and it gives me the plain text from those pages with extremely few errors (like a comma for a period sometimes). Big praises from me. Hope you can get it working.

Mark
3

make sure to block the app in the firewall

shadyfox2004
0

I love this app, saving me so much time and money. Its wonderful. One thing that i whish it had is linux support. That, adding a little competition to Foxit and Acrobat is great.

Review from a new or low-activity account — shown here, but not counted in the app rating.
7 of 16 comments

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Official Links

AppStores & Other Links

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What is PDFgear?

A Comprehensive Solution of PDF Issues. Directly solve the problems when you are working on PDF anywhere any time.

Covers PDF overall Whether editing, reading, converting, splitting, merging, or encrypting pdfs, PDFgear covers all.

No installation signup Free to use without any subscription and software installation using PDFgear online toolkit.

100% no purchase-in-app Non-profile for paperless workflows.

AI Features First ever PDF application that allows you to interact through AI. Summarise documents, find data and do a lot more using the inbuilt AI Assistant, at no cost.

Free from files limit PDFgear provides the best free-to-use experience with no file size and number limit.

Support team Any problems while using PDFgear would be handled immediately with our support team.

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Office & Productivity, AI Tools & Services

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  •   4.74 avg rating
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Our users have written 16 comments and reviews about PDFgear, and it has gotten 79 likes

PDFgear was added to AlternativeTo by kultegin on and this page was last updated .