PDF tools in 2026
6 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, Adobe Acrobat has the most readers, about 2k a month. 30 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. PdfCraft leads with 19k stars, ahead of BentoPDF. 28 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: MIT (12), Apache-2.0 (8) and AGPL-3.0 (7).
Commercial PDF tools
-
1
Adobe Acrobat Adobe Inc.
Adobe Acrobat is your complete PDF toolkit, enhanced with AI. Create, edit, sign, and manage all of your documents.
Complete system Production-ready You work with PDFs daily, need full editing, forms and redaction, and want the format's own reference tool.
2k readers a month Since 1993 Commercial -
2
ABBYY FineReader ABBYY
ABBYY's latest AI-based OCR technology powers this PDF editor software. Use tool to convert files (PDF to Excel, PDF to Word, etc.), edit, share, collaborate & more!
Complete system Production-ready You regularly need accurate OCR of scanned documents into editable formats on your own computer.
143 readers a month Since 1993 Commercial -
3
Foxit PDF Editor Foxit Software
Foxit PDF Editor is an AI-powered PDF editor for editing, converting, and signing PDFs. Save 44% vs. Adobe Acrobat. Trusted by 700M+ users. Try it free.
Complete system Production-ready A business needs Acrobat-level PDF editing across many seats for less money.
Commercial -
4
Nitro PDF Pro Nitro Software
Simplify how your business works. Streamline document workflows, boost productivity, and ensure data security with Nitro
Complete system Production-ready A company wants to replace Acrobat seats with a cheaper editor that includes e-signing.
Commercial -
5
Apryse SDK Apryse
Integrate document processing capabilities into any software applications. Generate, convert, view, edit, and sign pdf and documents easily.
Building block Production-ready Your product needs a full in-app document viewer and editor and you can pay for a commercial SDK.
Commercial -
6
Smallpdf Smallpdf
Smallpdf - the platform that makes it super easy to convert and edit all your PDF files. Solving all your PDF problems in one place - and yes, free.
Complete system Production-ready You need occasional quick PDF jobs in the browser without installing software.
Commercial
New open-source projects
-
1
PdfCraft storytold
PdfCraft: An open-source PDF reader and editor written by scratch in pure Rust
Complete system Experimental You want to try a fast native PDF workbench and do not need it to be dependable yet.
★ 19k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
2
TeXGlot Mengqi-Lei
Translate arXiv papers and LaTeX projects with your own LLM API, preserving equations, citations, and document structure. Generate translated PDFs and editable source through a local app or batch CLI.
Complete system Experimental A researcher regularly reads papers in another language and wants translations that keep the maths intact.
★ 117 Apache-2.0 Python Active, pushed 5 days ago
Open-source PDF tools
Complete systems you can adopt 7
-
1
PdfCraft storytold
PdfCraft: An open-source PDF reader and editor written by scratch in pure Rust
Complete system Experimental You want to try a fast native PDF workbench and do not need it to be dependable yet.
★ 19k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
2
BentoPDF alam00000
The Privacy First PDF Toolkit
Complete system Usable Staff need everyday PDF tasks without uploading documents to online PDF services.
★ 16k AGPL-3.0 JavaScript Active, pushed today -
3
OmniTools iib0011
Self-hosted collection of powerful web-based tools for everyday tasks. No ads, no tracking, just fast, accessible utilities right from your browser!
Complete system Usable You want an ad-free in-house replacement for the scattered online converter and formatter sites staff use.
★ 11k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 9 days ago -
4
Pdfarranger pdfarranger
Small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split PDF documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface.
Complete system Production-ready You regularly reorganise PDF pages on Linux or Windows and want a simple free tool.
★ 6k GPL-3.0 Python Active, pushed 2 days ago -
5
PDFsam torakiki
PDFsam, a desktop application to split, merge, mix, rotate PDF files and extract pages
Complete system Production-ready You need reliable offline page-level PDF work on Windows, macOS or Linux at no cost.
★ 4.7k AGPL-3.0 Java Active, pushed 3 days ago -
6
KillerPDF SteveTheKiller
Free and open-source PDF editor for Windows with a built-in PDF 2.0 engine. View, annotate, OCR, merge, split, crop, rotate, compare, edit text, draw, sign, fill forms, print, flatten, and open password-protected PDFs without a subscription.
Complete system Usable You want an Acrobat-style editor on Windows without a subscription and can accept a young project.
★ 4.3k GPL-3.0 C# Active, pushed today -
7
Yft-design dromara
yft-design is a powerful, visually stunning online design tool built with Vue3, fabric.js, and Element Plus. 基于fabric.js的开源版【稿定设计】。一款美观且功能强大的在线设计工具，具备海报设计和图片编辑功能。适用于多种场景，如海报生成、电商产品图制作、文章长图设计、视频/公众号封面编辑等 。
Complete system Usable A Chinese-speaking team wants a self-hostable Canva-style editor or a base to build one.
★ 1.7k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 2 months ago
Building blocks for your own system 2
-
1
Pdfcpu pdfcpu
PDF tooling for Go and the command line.
Building block Production-ready You need to script PDF manipulation in Go services or shell pipelines.
★ 8.9k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today -
2
Pikepdf pikepdf
A Python library for reading and writing PDF, powered by QPDF
Building block Production-ready Python code needs to manipulate PDF structure, metadata, pages or encryption reliably, including damaged files.
★ 2.8k MPL-2.0 Python Active, pushed yesterday
Developer tools 1
-
1
Qpdf qpdf
qpdf: A content-preserving PDF document transformer
Developer tool Production-ready You need reliable scripted PDF structural operations in a pipeline.
★ 5.5k Apache-2.0 C++ Active, pushed 37 days ago
Compared head to head
Looking for an alternative to
Open-source licenses
- Permissive: 20. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
- Network copyleft: 7. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
- Strong copyleft: 2. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
- Weak copyleft: 1. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.
Languages
TypeScript 8, Python 5, Rust 3, JavaScript 3, Go 2, C++ 2, Java 2, C# 2, Kotlin 2 and Svelte 1.
Made software that belongs here? Add it. Listing is free.