PDFgear vs UPDF
Both are bought outright, both sit in documents, and both are bought by people leaving Adobe Acrobat Pro subscription, Smallpdf subscription. Here is what actually differs — including what each price does not buy.
The short answer
- PDFgear is free; UPDF costs $79.99.
- PDFgear has the cleaner licence: free, against lifetime plan available for UPDF.
- UPDF needs an account with the developer; PDFgear does not.
Side by side
 PDFgearFreeFree |  UPDF$79.99Lifetime tier | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | free PDF editor for Mac with no account and no paid tier | one payment, four devices, Mac and phone on the same licence |
| Price | Free | $79.99 |
| Licence | Free | Lifetime plan available |
| What you get | No licence to buy. | Normally sold as a subscription, but a genuine one-time lifetime option exists. |
| The catch | Closed source with no stated business model, so nothing guarantees it stays free | The AI Assistant is a separate US$69/year subscription, not part of the lifetime licence |
| Macs per licence | not established | 4 |
| Account required | no | yes |
| Works offline | partly | partly |
| Apple Silicon | not established | Yes |
| Free trial | No | Yes |
| On Setapp | No | 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
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.
UPDF
An Acrobat-style PDF editor covering editing, OCR, conversion, forms, redaction and compression. Normally sold yearly, but the lifetime licence is a genuine one-time purchase that includes future version upgrades.