The free Windows PDF editor that can replace Adobe

Adobe Acrobat is an excellent PDF editor, and it’s the business standard. But with pricing starting at $13 a month, it isn’t right for everyone. For anyone who only needs to edit a PDF now and then—or anyone who uses Adobe Acrobat at work but also occasionally needs to perform some basic edits at home—Windows PCs, bafflingly, don’t include an out-of-the-box PDF editor. 

I suggest PDFgear instead.

What is PDFgear?

PDFgear is a free Adobe Acrobat alternative that lets you do lightweight PDF editing. You can delete elements, change text, split PDFs into multiple documents, merge multiple PDFs, remove pages, add signatures, and all the other standard-seeming stuff. 

To start, just go download PDFgear on whatever Windows system you’re using. The app works on Windows 11 as well as Windows 10 and can even run completely offline—aside from its optional ChatGPT-based AI chatbot, which only works if you have an internet connection.

From there, you won’t have to sign up for an account or pay a single penny: just install the app, then launch it. The main PDFgear window provides a collection of convenient converters and other tools—for example, you can split a PDF into multiple pages or convert a PDF to a PowerPoint presentation, all with a couple quick clicks.

To edit a PDF, use the Open File button in PDFgear and select the file. You can also just right-click a PDF file in Windows File Explorer and select Open With > PDFgear.

With that, you’ll find yourself facing a polished and modern PDF editor window with a ribbon full of options. 

• The options under Edit will let you edit text and objects in the file, add text and images, change links, insert watermarks, and add signatures.

  

• Under Page, you’ll see thumbnail previews of every page in the PDF. You can then easily reorder the pages, crop them, remove them from the PDF, extract them as separate PDFs, rotate pages, add new pages, or whatever else you want to do.

  

• On the program’s Tools page, for instance, you’ll find options for adding and removing a PDF’s password. (Naturally, if a PDF is password-protected, you’ll need to provide that password to open it in PDFgear or any other PDF application in the first place.)

PDFgear also lets you mark up a PDF and fill forms within it—though, to Adobe’s credit, the free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader also supports those same basic form-filling features. But PDFgear is capable of being your one-stop shop for PDF viewing, filling, and editing without the bloat or the cost.

When you’re done, just click Save on the toolbar. No signups, no subscriptions.

Why is PDFgear free?

You might wonder how an application like this can be completely free. PDFgear’s website explains that the tool is free in order to help its creator gain market share from Adobe and other PDF editing tools. The site promises that the tool doesn’t harvest user data or display ads to make money and is instead sustained by outside investments.

In the future, the company plans to charge a fee for more advanced options, like its AI-powered PDF editing features, but the current plan is for the majority of its features to remain free indefinitely.

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