5 Best Open Source Adobe Acrobat Alternatives

While Adobe Acrobat is an extremely popular PDF viewing and editing tool, some people prefer the freedom and flexibility that comes with using an open-source software. When you use an open-source Adobe Acrobat alternative, you have the ability to modify and customize the software to create a PDF editor that fits your exact needs.

In this article, we will discuss the 5 best alternative to Adobe Acrobat open-source tools, including the key features of each tool, how customers rate that tool, and where you can download it. And as a bonus, we include our best recommendation for an Adobe Acrobat alternative – UPDF with lower price and similar features! Click the below button to check it if you only want to find a better Adobe Acrobat alternative.

Part 1. 5 Best Open Source Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

If you need an open-source alternative to Adobe Acrobat, this article discusses your best five choices. We’ll look at the features and customer ratings of each alternative PDF program so you can choose which open-source software is the best for you.

1. PDFedit

PDFedit is a free, open-source software that you can use for editing PDFs. PDFedit is designed for use on Linux operating systems, but you may be able to run it on non-Linux systems like Windows. PDFEdit has many tools to help you customize and modify PDF documents, such as adding text, adding images, annotating PDFs, and adding fillable form fields. With PDFedit you can also rearrange and reorder PDF pages and adjust existing content.

Key Features:

Here are the key features of PDFedit:

• Editing tools to add or modify text and images
• Annotation tools to add comments, highlighted text, and shapes
• Form field editing to create interactive and fillable forms
• Rearrange pages, merge PDFs, split PDFs, and extract information from PDFs
• Encrypt or decrypt files
• Add digital signatures

Platforms Supported: Linux

Code Download Link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit/files/pdfedit/ 

Customer Rating: 3/5 ⭐

2. PDFsam

PDFsam is an open-source and versatile PDF editing tool with many features for editing PDFs. PDFsam is available across many different platforms, and there is both a basic version of PDFsam that is free, and a paid version of PDFsam that has more advanced features available. With the free version of PDFsam, you can read and view PDFs, split PDFs, rotate pages, and merge PDFs. Some of the more advanced features in the paid version include editing tools, conversion tools, OCR, and more.

Key Features:

Here are the key features of the basic version of PDFsam:

• Merge PDF files
• Rotate files
• Extract text from PDFs
• Split PDFs

Here are the key features of the advanced version of PDFsam:

• Edit PDFs
• Annotate PDFs
• Convert files to PDF
• Create fillable forms
• Perform OCR
• Add digital signatures

Platforms Supported: Windows, Linux, and macOS

Code Download Link: https://github.com/torakiki/pdfsam 

Customer Rating: 4.5 ⭐

Also Read: Top 5 Adobe Reader Alternatives to Upgrade Your PDF Experience

3. LibreOffice Draw

LibreOffice Draw is an open-source drawing tool that’s part of the LibreOffice suite of tools (often used as an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite). While LibreOffice Draw is not specifically a PDF editing tool, it does have same basic PDF editing features that can help you customize your PDFs, especially if you have PDFs with a lot of drawing or diagramming in them (such as CAD designs).

Key Features:

Here are the PDF editing features of LibreOffice Draw:

• Import PDFs to view and read
• Edit the text in PDFs, including changing existing text, font size, color, and placement
• Add shapes, lines, and images to PDFs
• Add annotations, like comments, highlights, and text boxes
• Add, delete, and rearrange pages

Platforms Supported: Linux, Windows, macOS

Code Download Link: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/q/status:open+-is:wip 

Customer Rating: 3/5 ⭐

4. XpdfReader

XpdfReader is a free, open-source PDF reader and toolkit. It’s a very simple, and very minimal tool that’s best used just for opening and reading PDFs.

Key Features:

With XpdfReader, you can view and read PDFs, extract attached files from PDFs, list fonts that are used in PDFs, extra images, extract metadata, and convert PDFs to other file types, including text, PostScript, HTML, and image files.

Platforms Supported: Linux, Windows, macOS

Code Download Link: https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html 

Customer Rating: 2/5 ⭐

5. Sumatra PDF

Sumatra PDF is an open-source program that allows you to view many different kinds of documents, including PDF, HTML, EPUB, MOBI, PRC, and more. Sumatra has a simple interface and is designed for handheld devices, such as mobile phones and e-readers. However, Sumatra PDF is very fast to work, has no ads, works offline, allows you to do some simple annotating, is portable, and there is no registration required.

Key Features:

Sumatra PDF is mainly used for viewing documents. You cannot edit or convert documents with Sumatra PDF. Here are some of the features of Sumatra PDF:

• Support for multiple file formats
• Simple and intuitive user interface
• Basic viewing features, such as zooming, scrolling, and navigating through pages
• Search for specific text within a PDF
• Printing support for page layout, orientation, and printer settings

Platforms Supported: Windows

Code Download Link: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf 

Customer Rating: 4/5 ⭐

Part 2. No1. Adobe Acrobat Alternative - UPDF

While it’s nice to know that open-source tools are free and available to everyone, you may run into some problems using open-source software, such as having no dedicated customer support or not always having current updates available. Open-source software also lacks powerful features and may have a less sophisticated user interface than other PDF editing tools.

However, if you do not want to deal with the issues of an open-source Adobe Acrobat alternative, you can use UPDF! UPDF has all the features you need for reading, editing, annotating, and securing PDFs. UPDF also has powerful AI features that allow you to chat with your PDFs, summarize content, explain information, translate text, and generate content.

UPDF works on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS, and is much more affordable than Adobe Acrobat. UPDF is also continuously being updated to have the best possible tools and features to enhance your PDF experience.

Impressed by all of UPDF’s cool features? Click the button below to download UPDF and try them all out!

You can use UPDF’s editing tools to customize your PDFs, including adding text, images, and links. You can also annotate your PDFs with UPDF, such as highlighting important information, adding sticky notes, drawing shapes, measuring distances, and more. UPDF also has OCR capabilities, security tools, batch processing tools, and AI features to summarize, explain, translate, and generate content!

To learn more about UPDF, watch the below video guide, and click the button below to download UPDF and start your free trial.

Part 3. Adobe Acrobat Open Source Alternatives Vs UPDF: Which One is Better?

If you prefer to quickly determine which Adobe Acrobat open source alternative is the best choice for you, you can use this table to compare and contrast the features of each tool. This will help you decide which program is best.

Items	UPDF	PDFedit	PDFsam	LibreOffice Draw	XpdfReader	Sumatra PDF
Read PDF
Edit PDF
Convert PDF
OCR PDF
Create PDF
Annotate PDF
Batch PDF
Organize PDF
Batch PDF
Compress PDF
Flatten PDF
Protect PDF
Share PDF
AI features

Based on the table above, you can see that most of the open-source Adobe Acrobat alternatives are very simple, and don’t have many powerful features. The best Adobe Acrobat alternative tool is UPDF because of its many features, including the ability to edit and annotate PDFs, perform OCR, batch process PDFs, and use AI to generate content.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking for an open source Adobe Acrobat alternative, you have many options to choose from, including the 5 open source programs we discussed: PDFedit, PDFsam, LibreOffice Draw, XpdfReader, and Sumatra PDF. However, sometimes open source programs can have issues, such as security, not enough features, or difficulty of use. Because of this, we recommend using UPDF as an Adobe Acrobat alternative for all of your PDF needs.

Click the button below to download UPDF and start your free trial to see all of UPDF’s amazing features.