UPDF

UPDF is aimed squarely at people who need most of what Acrobat does and refuse to rent it. The feature list is wide rather than deep: editing text and images in place, OCR on scans, conversion out to Office formats, form filling, real redaction, page reordering, compression. None of it is the best implementation on the Mac, but all of it is present and the app is quick.

What makes the lifetime tier interesting is the device count. One purchase covers four devices across macOS, Windows, iOS and Android, and the plan explicitly includes future version upgrades, so this is closer to owning the software than most "lifetime" offers in this category.

Where it gets murky is the add-ons. The AI assistant is its own yearly subscription and so is signing, which means the tidy one-time story only holds for the PDF tools themselves. Budget accordingly, and ignore the permanently expiring discount banners.

Skip it if you mainly annotate and sign, where Preview and a cheaper single-purpose app will do, or if you care about a polished Mac interface more than coverage — PDF Expert is the nicer app to sit in front of, at nearly twice the price and Mac only.