Best Free PDF Editor for Mac (2026): 8 Tools I Actually Tested

PDFgear (best free desktop editor)

PDFgear is the closest thing to a free Acrobat I found. It's a native Mac app that edits the actual text inside a PDF, inserts images and shapes, fills and creates form fields, and runs OCR in over 30 languages to turn a scan into editable text or a Word file.

Who it's for: anyone who needs to do more than annotate and doesn't want to pay or hit a daily limit. I rewrote a paragraph in a contract, merged three files, and exported to .docx without seeing a single upsell.

Pricing is the headline. According to its G2 profile, PDFgear is "entirely free to use" with no watermarks and no account required, and it holds a 4.8 out of 5 rating there. It also ships a GPT-powered "Copilot" that summarizes documents and answers questions about them, which is genuinely useful for long reports.

The catch: a fully free tool with no clear business model always makes me a little nervous about long-term support, and the AI assistant runs in the cloud, so don't feed it anything confidential. Text reflow on complex, multi-column layouts can also get messy, which is true of every editor in this list.

Apple Preview (best for annotation and signing)

Preview is already sitting in your Applications folder. For markup it's excellent: highlight, underline, add text boxes, draw shapes, insert a signature you've saved (or sign with your trackpad), reorder and delete pages, and fill out forms. For 90% of everyday PDF tasks, this is the answer, and you don't install anything.

Who it's for: people who sign documents, mark up drafts, or rearrange pages and never need to touch the original text.

The catch is the big one. As Apple's own support docs state, you "can't edit the text of a PDF in Preview." You can lay annotations on top, but you can't fix a typo in the existing copy. Preview also won't run OCR on a scanned document, so an image-only PDF stays uneditable. The moment you need to change actual words, you've outgrown it.

Sejda (best browser editor, no install)

Sejda is the rare web tool that edits the original text in a PDF, not just overlays. Open it in Safari or Chrome, click into a line, and retype. It also handles merging, splitting, compressing, signing, and form filling. There's a desktop app too, but the browser version is what makes it convenient.

Who it's for: someone who edits PDFs occasionally and would rather not install software. I used it from a borrowed laptop and got a contract amended in two minutes.

Pricing is where you need to read the fine print. The free tier caps you at 3 tasks per hour on the web (3 per day on desktop), with files limited to 50MB or 200 pages. That's fine for one-off jobs and frustrating for a busy day.

The catch: uploading documents to a web server is a privacy trade-off. Sejda says it deletes files after a few hours, but for anything sensitive I'd reach for a desktop app like PDFgear or Preview instead.

Skim (best for researchers)

Skim is a free, open-source PDF reader and note-taker built specifically for macOS, and it's beloved by academics. It excels at reading and annotating papers: highlight, add notes, draw boxes, take "snapshots" of a region, and view every annotation in a side panel you can export as text. It plays nicely with LaTeX, SyncTeX, and BibDesk.

Who it's for: grad students and researchers who live in PDFs of journal articles and want fast, structured note-taking.

The catch: Skim is a reader and annotator, not an editor. It stores notes separately and never changes the source file, which is great for preserving originals but means you can't edit the document's actual text or content. If your job is reading and marking up papers, it's perfect. If you need to alter the PDF itself, look elsewhere.

LibreOffice Draw (best for reflowing text and layout)

LibreOffice is the free, open-source office suite, and its Draw module opens a PDF as an editable document. Because it treats text as objects you can move, resize, and retype, it's better than most tools when you need to change wording and have the layout adjust. It's completely free with no limits and no watermark.

Who it's for: people who occasionally need to substantially rework a PDF's text and don't mind a learning curve.

The catch: fidelity. Multi-column layouts, tables, and graphics-heavy files often don't import cleanly, so you'll spend time fixing fonts and spacing. The interface also feels dated next to PDFgear or UPDF. Treat it as a free workhorse for text-heavy edits, not a precision tool.

If you spend a lot of time wrangling documents like this, it's worth auditing your whole stack. We keep a running list of the top AI tools we'd actually pay for, and Dupple X bundles the premium ones into a single membership if you'd rather not subscribe to each separately.

Smallpdf (best for quick conversions)

Smallpdf is a clean set of web-based PDF tools: convert to and from Word, compress, merge, split, and a basic editor for adding text and shapes. The interface is the friendliest on this list, and you can chain a few tools together quickly.

Who it's for: someone who needs a fast one-off conversion or compression and wants zero friction.

Pricing has tightened. The free plan now limits you to roughly 2 tasks per day across all tools, so a compress plus a merge can use up your daily quota. Paid plans start around $9 a month.

The catch: the free tier is too thin for regular use, and like any web tool it requires uploading your files. Smallpdf's text editing is also lighter than Sejda's: it leans toward adding text rather than rewriting what's there.

UPDF (best paid app with a free trial)

UPDF is the most polished editor I tried, with a modern interface that rivals Acrobat. It edits text and images, runs OCR, converts, organizes pages, and adds AI features that summarize and translate documents. The free version lets you test everything, but it applies limits and watermarks until you pay.

Who it's for: people who want a near-Acrobat experience and are willing to spend a little. At $49.99 a year (a flat rate, not monthly) it undercuts Adobe substantially.

The catch: it's not actually free. The free version is a trial, so for a permanently free editor PDFgear is the better pick. But if you edit PDFs daily and want something that feels premium, UPDF is the best value among the paid options.

PDF24 (best for batch utilities)

PDF24 is a free German-made toolkit with dozens of small utilities: merge, split, compress, convert, OCR, rotate, watermark, and more. There's a web version and a Windows desktop app; on Mac you'll mostly use the browser tools. Everything is free with no task limits, which is unusual.

Who it's for: people who need to batch-process files, like compressing 20 PDFs or running OCR across a stack of scans.

The catch: it's a utility belt, not a true editor. The text-editing experience is weak compared to PDFgear or Sejda, and the desktop app skips macOS. Use it for the mechanical jobs and edit elsewhere.