PDF Squeezer vs PDFgear
Both are bought outright, both sit in documents, and both are bought by people leaving Smallpdf, iLovePDF Premium. Here is what actually differs — including what each price does not buy.
The short answer
- PDFgear is free; PDF Squeezer costs $19.99.
- PDF Squeezer has the cleaner licence: buy once, own forever, against free for PDFgear.
Side by side
 PDF Squeezer$19.99Perpetual |  PDFgearFreeFree | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | drag a fat PDF in, get a small PDF out, for twenty dollars | free PDF editor for Mac with no account and no paid tier |
| Price | $19.99 | Free |
| Licence | Buy once, own forever | Free |
| What you get | One payment. Updates included, indefinitely. | No licence to buy. |
| The catch | Compression only: no editing, OCR or signing, and a future major version may be paid | Closed source with no stated business model, so nothing guarantees it stays free |
| Macs per licence | 5 | not established |
| Account required | no | no |
| Works offline | yes | partly |
| Apple Silicon | Yes | not established |
| Free trial | Yes | No |
| On Setapp | Yes | No |
| Minimum macOS | not established | not established |
| App Store rating | not established | not established |
| Last updated | not established | not established |
| Price checked | 2026-09-22 | 2026-09-22 |
Apple’s public API reports a rating for only a small minority of Mac apps, and returns zero for most of the rest even when the store page plainly shows reviews. A blank here means we could not read a number, never that an app is unrated or disliked.
In their own right
PDF Squeezer
A single-purpose compressor for PDFs that are too big to email or upload. Drop files in, pick a compression profile, and it rewrites the images inside, in batches, with a before-and-after view.
PDFgear
Edits text inside finished PDFs, converts to and from Office formats, merges, splits, signs and OCRs — and asks for nothing: no licence, no account, no watermark. The app to try before you spend money on PDF editing.