A Comprehensive Review of PDF Candy & Its Better Alternative

With the growing use of digital documents, PDF has become the most widely used format to view, print, and share documents. Looking at this trend, many tools now assist in PDF-related activities, like converting, editing, merging, etc.

PDF Candy is one such tool that offers powerful PDF conversion functionality and plenty of other tools to edit, merge, compress, split, and do more with PDFs. Therefore, this guide is going to perform a comprehensive PDF Candy review, covering its features, performance, user reviews, and other details. The guide also evaluates PDF Candy with its better alternative, the UPDF.

Part 1. PDF Candy – A Complete Look

Before we evaluate the performance and efficiency, let's first start by mentioning all the basics of PDF Candy you should know about.

What Is PDF Candy? What Can It Do?

PDF Candy is a web-based PDF converter that can convert PDF to/from 20+ formats, including Word, Excel, PPT, image, and more. Besides PDF conversion, PDF Candy also provides 46+ more tools to perform many other PDF-related activities, such as editing, compressing, merging, splitting, organizing, protecting, and similar others.

PDF Candy also offers a desktop version that includes most of its online features. However, its capabilities do not match with modern desktop PDF editors, as you cannot edit or add watermarks through its desktop version.

In contrast, UPDF is another desktop-based PDF editor, but it offers more enhanced functionalities, including a powerful PDF editing toolkit, extensive annotation options, AI virtual assistance, and many more advanced features. Therefore, if you are looking for a full-fledged PDF editor and convertor tool, download UPDF immediately and get every advanced feature you expect under one roof.

Is PDF Candy Free?

Yes. If you look at the PDF Candy website, it claims itself as the "free online PDF converter". However, it allows unregistered users to download only 1 edited PDF in one hour for free on the web. To register on PDF Candy website, you have to choose a price plan to purchase. Besides that, its free version also comes with a file size limit.

So, if you want to use PDF Candy extensively, then you have to purchase one of its below plans:

The above price plan reflects that we get very limited free access with its free plan, and we must choose one of its premium plans to use its full potential.

Is PDF Candy Safe to Use?

PDF Candy is a legitimate tool and safe to use. It has been offering online and offline access to services since 2016. It was built by the Icecream Apps. The company has also built many other tools, such as video editing, screen recording, photo editing, etc.

PDF Candy is also offering customer support services to resolve technical issues of users. Overall, PDF Candy is a safe tool to convert and edit PDFs.

How Does PDF Candy Work?

As mentioned above, PDF Candy offers both web-based and desktop functionalities. However, its web-based version has more features. It just requires us to choose the relevant feature, upload the file(s), and use the tool.

To better understand the performance and efficiency of PDF Candy, we will test its few web-based functionalities. To start with, we will ask it to convert PDF to Word file.

After uploading the file, it provided us with just three options to convert, i.e., DOC, DOCX, and JPG. Choose the DOC or DocX as you desire.

The conversion took a few seconds, and we were able to download a Word file.

Next, we decided to edit PDF with PDF Candy and see its editing capabilities. After uploading the sample file, it took us to the PDF editor dashboard where we could access many editing and annotating tools.

We were able to easily make the edits in the text, but it failed to edit the images and links. While highlighting text, we also experienced some small malfunctions. Overall, it just offers basic level editing functionality. Moreover, the PDF edit feature is only accessible on the web, not on its desktop app.

Next, we decided to merge a few PDF files. It provides us the option to add PDF files directly from PC, Google Drive, or Dropbox. Once we processed the merging request, it mentioned that the task queued and made us wait some time to download the merged file. However, other PDF tools like UPDF usually offer a faster way to merge PDFs.

Since we have crossed the 3 tasks per 1-hour limit, we were forced to wait for 1 hour to process more files.

Overall, PDF Candy offers all the essential features we can expect from such tools, but its limited functionality per hour can hinder the experience in its free version.

User Reviews and Pros & Cons

PDF Candy has a 4.2/5 star rating on Trustpilot. Users have given mixed reviews about PDF Candy. The users seem to enjoy the quality conversion and other services they get with PDFCandy.com. Many have appreciated their responsive customer support. However, there are users who face malfunctions while editing files, deleting files, or accessing license keys. Moreover, users have shown concerns about the fewer features in its Desktop version.

Looking at user reviews and its pros and cons, PDF Candy is an effective tool if you use its premium version. However, UPDF is another similar PDF editor tool that provides access to many basic PDF editing and conversion features for free without any time limit. So, download UPDF if you want to access basic editing and conversion features without any hourly limits for free.

Part 2. The Best and More Powerful Alternative of PDF Candy

PDF Candy provides all the essential features we mostly need related to PDFs. So, its better alternative should be the one that offers more enhanced features with a more intuitive approach and cost-effectiveness. This is exactly what UPDF has to offer.

UPDF is an AI-driven, powerful PDF editor tool that provides all the basic to advanced features we need for almost all PDF-related matters. Whether it's extensive editing, annotating, converting, merging, compressing, or anything else, it is a one-stop desktop tool for handling PDFs.

Below are the main reasons why UPDF performs better than PDF Candy:

• User-friendly Interface: UPDF provides a more intuitive, click-based interface with zero learning curve.
• Categorized Features: Its features are categorized effectively for easy accessibility compared to the uncategorized approach of PDF Candy.
• Extensive Editing: It can not only edit text but also allow you to add/remove/crop/replace images and edit links.
• Readability Support: It allows you to read PDFs easily with different viewing layouts, light/dark mode, and slideshow features.
• Comprehensive Annotation: It provides a wide range of annotating functions, including adding stamps/stickers, comments, etc.
• Compatibility: It is compatible with Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices.
• UPDF Cloud: It provides 1 GB cloud storage on the free version and 10 GB cloud storage on paid plans.
• UPDF AI: It includes a built-in ChatGPT-powered AI assistant that can help you ask document-related questions and consume lengthy PDFs easily with instant summaries, explanations, translation, etc.
• Create/Fill Fillable PDF Forms: It allows you to create or fill fillable PDF forms effortlessly on computers and smartphones.
• Compress PDFs: It allows you to choose between different compressed sizes based on different qualities: maximum, high, medium, and low.
• Organize Pages: It allows you to add, replace, extract, split, crop, rotate, delete, and rearrange PDF pages.
• No Hourly Limit: There is no hourly limit in its free version.
• Cost-Effective: It provides more cost-friendly plans, as it provides complete access to all features (AI excluded) for $35.99/year or just $55.99/one-time fee.

Overall, UPDF is a full-fledged tool that you need to easily edit, convert, merge, or do other activities with PDFs. So, download and purchase UPDF now and access its extensive list of features right away.

Part 3. Comparison Table: PDF Candy vs. UPDF

To help you decide between PDF Candy and UPDF, below is a detailed comparison table between them:

The above comparison table reflects the supremacy of UPDF over PDF Candy in almost all aspects. UPDF provides more extensive editing, annotating, creating forms, organizing pages, etc. Moreover, its UPDF AI assistant and cost-friendly paid plans further increase the credibility of UPDF. Presently, UPDF is extending a limited-time offer for those who acquire UPDF Pro along with the AI add-on feature. So, simply purchase and download UPDF Pro and use a more powerful tool to easily edit, convert, merge, and do any activity with PDFs effortlessly.

Conclusion

PDF Candy serves as a central tool to fulfill most of the common PDF-related needs, such as converting, editing, merging, organizing, etc. However, it works best only if you use its premium plans. In contrast, UPDF shines as its ideal alternative, as not only does it offer advanced features, but it is also low-cost. To wrap up, UPDF is a recommended pick due to being an all-in-one, powerful PDF editor and converter tool you need for all your simple to complex PDF-related activities.