Alternatives to PDF-XChange Editor
PDF-XChange Editor is one of the cheapest one-off licences here, and the vendor states it works on your own machine rather than in a browser - which is the reason most people find it. The caution sits somewhere else. We could not establish whether its redaction removes content or draws over it, so if that is why you are choosing, the alternatives below include tools where the answer is known rather than unrecorded.
PDF-XChange Editor, as the index records it
- Files:
- Mixed - depends on version and feature
- Redaction:
- Not determined
- Price:
- Free · paid from £48.00 one-off
- Platforms:
- Windows
Worth knowing before you stay or go: Windows 10 or later only. The current version is 11.1.0.0 and the current single-user prices are GBP 48.00 for Editor and GBP 61.00 for Editor Plus, plus VAT, each including the first year of maintenance; the previously recorded GBP 47.00 and GBP 60.00 figures and the 11.0.1.0 version are superseded. There are no refunds once a licence key is issued. In evaluation mode, licensed features can be used but output carries a watermark that cannot be removed without a licence; free features are not universally watermarked, so the free-watermark position is conditional rather than uniform. The vendor says more than seventy per cent of features are free, which is an approximate vendor statement rather than a measured score, and the 145 licensed features include the Editor Plus Enhanced OCR engine, fillable-form creation and editing, dynamic stamps, document comparison, Identify Forms and Add Placeholder. Digital signatures are PAdES-compliant and the editor can certify documents, add timestamps and perform long-term validation; the record makes no certificate-authority issuance or independent legal-validity guarantee. Visual signatures and the FreeSign tool are separate from certificate-based signing. OCR is available in the Editor with the default engine and in Editor Plus with the Enhanced OCR engine; language support is added through the Add/update Languages function and language packs, and no accuracy guarantee is made. Conversion covers the documented Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF/A, PDF/X, plain-text and WebP exports and the documented CSV, image, Office, Publisher, Visio, Markdown, RTF, text, metafile and XPS imports, with no fidelity guarantee. Save as Optimized, recompressing images and rasterising are documented, but no lossless or percentage-reduction guarantee is made. Core editing, OCR and conversion are local; optional AI Assistant features use third-party OpenAI, Anthropic or Google models only when the user supplies an API key, and cloud-storage integrations are optional, so those network paths are not covered by the local-processing claim.
The short answer
The closest PDF-XChange Editor alternatives in this index are Adobe Acrobat , Foxit PDF Editor and PDF Candy . They share enough of the job to be worth comparing, which is why they are on this page - a shared job tag is a candidate, not a finding that they work the same way. What separates them from PDF-XChange Editor is what they charge and whether your file leaves your machine. PDF-XChange Editor processes some versions on your device and runs others on a server, which the vendor documents, and 1 of the 6 listed have no vendor service in the path .
What else does the same jobs
5 or more of the same jobs, ordered by how many jobs they share - not by who pays us.
| Tool | Price | Licence | Your files | Redaction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adobe Acrobat 5 jobs in common: Edit, Convert, Compress, OCR, Sign | Free · paid from £14.99 a month | Not verified | Mixed - depends on version and feature | Removes the content |
| Foxit PDF Editor 5 jobs in common: Edit, OCR, Convert, Sign, Compress | From £8.15 a month | Not verified | Mixed - depends on version and feature | Removes the content |
| PDF Candy 5 jobs in common: Convert, Edit, Compress, OCR, Sign | Free · paid from £4.00 a month | Proprietary | Mixed - depends on version and feature | Covers it - content is not removed |
| PDF Studio 5 jobs in common: Edit, Sign, Convert, OCR, Compress | Paid | Proprietary | No server involved | Removes the content |
| Power PDF 5 jobs in common: Edit, Convert, Sign, OCR, Compress | From £95.00 one-off | proprietary | Mixed - depends on version and feature | Not determined |
| CamScanner 5 jobs in common: OCR, Convert, Compress, Edit, Sign | Free · paid from £4.99 a week | Not verified | Reported to upload your files | No redaction feature |
A tool marked same owner is operated by the same company as PDF-XChange Editor. That does not make it bad, but it is not an independent alternative - switching to it does not change who holds your documents or sets your terms.
1 of the 6 is desktop or command-line software, so there is no server in the path at all - PDF Studio. That is a statement about how the software is built rather than something we measured, which is why the files column words it differently from a tool we tested.