PDFpen Review: Powerful PDF Editing Made Easy
Working with PDFs is a fact of life for most professionals today. A recent survey by Adobe found that 74% of US office workers consider PDF the "default" format for documents, contracts and forms. PDFs help preserve document formatting across devices and make information sharing more secure.
But while just about every Mac user can open and read PDFs in Apple‘s Preview app, editing and annotating those PDFs is another story. If you want to do anything more than basic highlighting, you need a dedicated PDF editor. That‘s where Smile‘s PDFpen and PDFpenPro come in.
As a professional tech writer, I work with scores of PDF manuals, press releases, white papers and research studies every week. After relying on Adobe Acrobat for years, I recently spent a month testing PDFpen to see if it could win me over. Here‘s what I found.
What Is PDFpen?
PDFpen is an all-purpose PDF editor for macOS that aims to deliver the core functionality of Adobe Acrobat Pro at a much lower price point. With PDFpen, you can:
- Add and edit text, images and signatures in PDFs
- Highlight, underline and strikethrough text
- Draw arrows, rectangles, ovals and freehand scribbles
- Fill out interactive PDF forms and add signatures
- Redact (block out) sensitive text and images
- OCR scanned documents to make them editable and searchable
- Insert, delete, extract and rotate pages
- Create PDFs from scanned documents, Word files and web pages
PDFpen covers all the bases for most personal and professional PDF needs. But for advanced users – particularly in the legal, medical and publishing fields – there‘s also PDFpenPro. The Pro version adds:
- PDF form creation (not just filling out forms)
- Automatic form field recognition
- Table of contents creation and editing
- Convert websites into PDFs
- Add and edit document permissions
- Export to Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and PDF/A-1b formats
Both versions include a companion iOS app for working with PDFs on the go, with automatic syncing via iCloud.
How Does PDFpen Compare to the Competition?
To see how PDFpen stacks up, I compared it to three of the most popular PDF editors on the market: Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, PDF Expert from Readdle, and PDFelement from Wondershare. Here‘s a rundown of their key features and prices:
As you can see, PDFpen lands in the middle of the pack for both features and price. It can‘t match the high-end print production tools in Acrobat Pro, but it surpasses other budget editors like PDF Expert in OCR, form creation and page manipulation.
For me, the standout advantages of PDFpen are:
- Far better UI and navigation than Acrobat
- OCR that‘s as accurate as Acrobat in my tests
- All the form creation and editing features of Acrobat in PDFpenPro
- More flexible pricing and free upgrades compared to subscription-based Acrobat
If you don‘t need prepress and accessibility tools, PDFpen gives you 80-90% of Acrobat‘s functionality for a much more affordable price.
Navigating PDFpen‘s Interface
The first thing that struck me about PDFpen was how clean and intuitive the user interface is compared to Acrobat. The app adopts a familiar Mac-like layout with page thumbnails on the left, a main document view in the center, and markup tools in a top toolbar.
Most of the tools have clear labels, and you can toggle the thumbnail sidebar and toolbar on and off to suit your needs. I particularly like the Inspector pane on the right, which provides one-click access to common formatting options based on what you have selected – text, shapes, images or annotations.
The markup tools are also thoughtfully designed. You can highlight in different colors, underline with squiggly or straight lines, and redact text or images. Drawing tools include arrows, rectangles, ovals, lines and freehand scribbles, with adjustable fills, borders and shadows.
While most of these tools are self-explanatory, I appreciated the built-in help overlay that you can summon by clicking a question mark button. It provides brief descriptions of what each tool does.
For all its features, PDFpen maintains an uncluttered, logical layout that lets you jump in and start working without a massive learning curve. It‘s a stark contrast to Acrobat, where I always seem to waste time hunting through nested menus to find what I need.
The iOS app is also well-designed, with an interface optimized for the iPhone and iPad screens. All the crucial viewing and annotation tools are easily accessible, and iCloud syncing with the desktop app works seamlessly in the background.
Useful Tools for PDF Power Users
In my work, there are a few PDF editing functions I use more than others – OCR, redaction, form filling and page manipulation. PDFpen handled all of these tasks impressively.
When I scanned a textbook page and ran PDFpen‘s OCR function, the results were nearly perfect – comparable to what I get from Acrobat. PDFpen preserved the original formatting and only made a few small errors on some ambiguous punctuation marks. Considering Acrobat costs nearly three times more, I call that a win for PDFpen.
I also used PDFpen extensively to fill out contracts and other legal documents full of form fields. The Auto-Detect Form Fields function worked reliably to identify where I needed to input text. PDFpen‘s digital signature fields are also well implemented, making it easy to store and place signatures where needed.
The Preview app in macOS is decent for filling out basic forms, but with PDFpen I can also add new form fields, buttons and checkboxes. This is handy for adapting a template or creating an interactive PDF from scratch.
I was also impressed by the speed and accuracy of PDFpen‘s search and redaction tools. When I needed to quote a sensitive legal document in an article, searching for the text I wanted to redact took seconds. The redaction tool blacked out the offending text cleanly with one swipe.
When assembling a new PDF from multiple documents, I really appreciated PDFpen‘s drag and drop page merging. Just switch to Thumbnails view, select the pages you want to move around or delete, and reorder them visually. This is so much faster than Acrobat‘s clunky Insert and Extract pages menu.
Interesting Extras
Beyond the core viewing and editing functions, PDFpen has a few unexpected tools that come in handy for specific situations.
One is the ability to create a new PDF from a website URL. Just type or paste the URL into the dialog box, and PDFpen will convert it to a PDF, even preserving hyperlinks where possible. This is great for archiving webpages or saving online receipts for your records.
I also liked the Imprint feature, which lets you superimpose one PDF onto another. This could be used to add background graphics to a plain form, or place a signature stamp over a document at a specific size and position. It worked smoothly in my tests.
PDFpen Pro users have access to even more niche tools like editing a document‘s table of contents, setting document permissions, and exporting to additional formats like Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.
While you may not use these extras every day, they highlight the versatility of PDFpen. This app has a deep bag of tricks for when you need to pull off something beyond the basics.
What Could Be Better
While PDF is generally a high-quality app, room for improvement remains in a few areas. Here are some of the issues I encountered:
- Inconsistent text editing. The included OCR tool can‘t convert handwriting to selectable text like Acrobat can. The app also struggled to match fonts in some of my documents after editing, leaving new text looking out of place.
- Limited options for document security. If you need to control detailed access permissions to your PDFs, Acrobat is still the best solution. PDFpen can password-protect files and set basic restrictions on printing and copying, but it lacks Acrobat‘s full suite of enterprise security features.
- No Windows version. While the macOS and iOS apps are well integrated, Smile doesn‘t offer a Windows version of PDFpen. If you work in a multi-platform environment, you may prefer an editor like Adobe Acrobat or Foxit PhantomPDF that works across operating systems.
- Some trouble with large files. When I tried to OCR a 300+ page report, PDFpen struggled to process it and eventually crashed. To be fair, Acrobat is also prone to crashing on big jobs – but it at least offers a more robust auto-save and recovery. With PDFpen, I lost a chunk of unsaved markup work.
Most of these issues won‘t affect casual PDF users, who are PDFpen‘s core audience. But they‘re worth considering if you regularly exchange PDFs with Windows colleagues or need to secure sensitive documents.
Verdict: Best for Most Mac Users
After using PDFpen daily for the past month, I understand why many Mac experts recommend it as the best all-around PDF editor. Unless you need Acrobat‘s prepress and collaboration features, PDFpen delivers the most important PDF tools in a faster, friendlier and more affordable package.
With the accuracy of its OCR and the depth of its markup and form tools, PDFpen is powerful enough for most office workers, academics and macOS power users. The iOS companion app and iCloud syncing also make it great for iPad productivity workflows.
For professional users who need to secure, automate and export PDFs in advanced ways, the $125 PDFpenPro is a great value compared to an Adobe subscription. But for most people, the $75 standard version of PDFpen has all the tools you‘ll need.
Overall, I highly recommend PDFpen for any Mac user who wants to go beyond simple PDF viewing and annotation. It‘s an excellent alternative to Adobe Acrobat that won‘t weigh down your Mac with clunky, complicated interfaces. Download the free trial today and see how much time it can save you editing PDFs.
