PDFgear

Most people who pay for a PDF editor do so because they needed to fix a typo in a contract once and Preview would not let them. PDFgear does that, plus the rest of the list Acrobat is bought for: editing text and images in place, converting to and from Word and Excel, merging and splitting, compressing, filling forms, signing, and OCR on scanned pages. There is no licence, no sign-up, no watermark and no upsell screen, on either Mac or Windows.

The part worth thinking about is why. PDFgear is closed source and the site names no business model at all — no pro tier, no ads, no enterprise edition. That is not a reason to avoid it, but it is a reason not to build a workflow that assumes this stays free forever. Download the installer, keep it somewhere, and you will always have the version you liked. The bundled AI chat is the other boundary: it uploads the document to PDFgear's servers, so it is fine for a lease agreement and wrong for anything under NDA.

If you edit PDFs weekly, install this first and see whether you ever hit a wall. The people who genuinely need Acrobat — redaction that stands up in court, PDF/A archival compliance, prepress preflight — will know within a day.