Adobe Acrobat
Adobe's PDF toolkit: free browser tools plus the paid Acrobat Pro desktop app.
Opens the vendor's own site.
Jobs covered
Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.
Edit
Browse all edit toolsediting PDF content by updating text and images and rearranging content, in Adobe Acrobat desktop, included in the Standard and Pro plans
Convert
Browse all convert toolsWord, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher, text, image and other supported files to PDF in Reader; export is a separate feature
Compress
Browse all compress toolscompressing PDFs by selecting a High, Medium or Low compression level, which Acrobat applies by reducing image resolution, flattening interactive layers and removing unused metadata, in the Acrobat online tool and desktop app, where unlimited compression requires a paid plan
OCR
Browse all ocr toolsrecognising text in scanned documents to turn them into editable, searchable PDFs, documented for Acrobat Pro and for the Acrobat Scan mobile app which recognises text automatically
Accessibility
Browse all accessibility toolschecking PDF accessibility against PDF/UA and WCAG with the Prepare for accessibility and Check for accessibility tools, including an accessibility report, reading options and the Reading Order tool, in Acrobat Pro
Protect
Browse all protect toolspassword-protecting PDFs so that only people with the password can open them, with permission controls that restrict actions such as editing, copying and printing, in the Acrobat online tools and in Acrobat Pro
Sign
Browse all sign toolssigning PDFs with an electronic signature by typing, drawing or uploading an image of a signature, and with certificate-based digital signatures, in the free Acrobat online sign tool and the Acrobat Reader mobile app, where requesting signatures from others and audit trails may require a paid plan
Where your files are processed
Mixed - depends on version and feature
The vendor's own documentation separates them. On the device: Acrobat desktop on Windows and macOS, and Acrobat Reader. On their servers: Acrobat online tools and Document Cloud services. A single answer for the whole product would be wrong for one of them.
It depends on the surface. The desktop application and Reader work on files on the machine, while the online tools upload a document to Adobe’s service, which the vendor describes as keeping it for a short period.
The online upload and that short deletion period are what the record can say; no exact retention duration is invented and none is extended to files a signed-in account saves. Anonymous eligible tasks differ from signed-in workflows and from desktop activation, so an account requirement cannot be answered once for the whole family.
What it does
Adobe Acrobat is two products sharing a name: free browser-based PDF tools on adobe.com, and the paid Acrobat Pro desktop application for Windows and Mac. The online tools handle conversion, compression, editing, merging, page management, OCR, password protection and e-signing.
Free web use is tightly capped unless you pay, and files are uploaded to Adobe's servers for processing. Acrobat Pro adds offline desktop editing.
Acrobat Pro also carries the accessibility toolset - checking a document against PDF/UA and WCAG, fixing reading order and tags, and generating an accessibility report.
Best for
Casual users who want the reference PDF tools for a one-off job, and professionals or teams that need the full Acrobat Pro desktop editor.
Worth knowing
Free online use is severely limited - roughly one transaction without signing in, and about one premium transaction per 30 days once signed in. Files are uploaded to Adobe's servers rather than processed in the browser.
There is no universal 100 MB limit: the vendor FAQ distinguishes ordinary tools, Word and PowerPoint conversion, compression and splitting, and gives its own page and file counts for merging, so those distinctions are kept rather than one aggregate maximum. The one-per-30-days premium allowance is documented, while free signed-in filling, signing, commenting and sharing differ from it.
Acrobat is a broader family than two products: free Reader, the online tools and the paid desktop editions are separate, and Pro-only redaction and accessibility capabilities are not attributed to all of them. Applied removal, sanitisation of hidden data and saving the result are workflow stages rather than the same thing as drawing an annotation, and the separate Adobe developer products are linked without implying the consumer online editor has an API.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- Web · Windows · macOS
- Website
- adobe.com
- Requires an account
- No
- Free tier
- Yes
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- 100 MB
- Batch processing
- Not verified
- Data residency
- Not verified
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- No
- Licence
- Not verified
- Redaction
- Removes the content
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 72 ms 21 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
“Redaction is permanently removing visible text and graphics from a document. … In place of the removed items, you can have redaction marks that appear as colored boxes or leave the area blank.”
What that does not establish
Read from an Internet Archive snapshot dated 2 January 2025, because the live page refuses our requests - Akamai answers a headless browser with "Access Denied". So this is Adobe’s page as it stood on that date, not as it stands today.
The same page separates two features that are easy to conflate: redaction, and "Sanitize and remove hidden information", which removes metadata and hidden content and is NOT what this verdict is about. Redaction is also Acrobat Pro only, which the guide’s tier note records.
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
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“Try 25+ powerful PDF and e-signing tools for free”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 21 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: "Try 25+ powerful PDF and e-signing tools for free" is the heading itself, and the line beneath it adds the framing Adobe wants attached to it - "Acrobat online tools from Adobe, the inventor of the PDF format". Two things belong with the claim.
The "25+" is a count of tools on a page rather than a service commitment, and "for free" describes access to the online tools rather than to Acrobat the application, which is what a reader arriving from the index might assume. The index's own entry for Acrobat covers the paid desktop product, so this claim sits under a tool whose headline price is not free.
Recorded as the vendor's wording; nothing was signed up for and no control was run.
Standing: Re-read and matched once per-response tokens were masked
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the raw HTTP response
- SHA-256
- e7c55d4cd42548cdb757768b3c015787b7ef2188ee403163eee789f52539fab0
How we checked
The page renders almost nothing - headless Chrome produced 192 bytes of visible text from https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online.html - so the claim was read from the raw HTML response, 55737 bytes saved and hashed, where it is an H2. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of that raw response.
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“Acrobat. It's how over 5 million companies get work done.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 21 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim, including the typographic apostrophe in "It's". It is a social-proof claim of the kind this tier holds most of, and it is unverifiable from the page: no source, methodology, date or definition of "companies" accompanies the figure, and the number is not reattributed anywhere else on the page.
Adobe is a public company that reports revenue rather than customer counts, so there is no filing to check it against. Recorded as the vendor's assertion, which is what it is - the finding says plainly that we could not establish it rather than implying otherwise.
Standing: Re-read and matched once per-response tokens were masked
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the raw HTTP response
- SHA-256
- d77bd2506ff3bada3da3c555bc4ebde86daf05ecd8bd61ce3e46187f3c766da8
How we checked
The page renders 185 bytes of visible text, so the claim was read from the raw HTML response of https://www.adobe.com/acrobat.html, 34463 bytes saved and hashed, where it is an H2 with its own anchor. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of that raw response.
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“You can use Acrobat to make PDFs meet the common accessibility standards, such as the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and PDF/UA (Universal Access, or ISO 14289).”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 21 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: "You can use Acrobat to make PDFs meet the common accessibility standards, such as the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and PDF/UA (Universal Access, or ISO 14289)." One wording detail is worth recording because the claim repeats it. The sentence says "the latest version" of WCAG, and the same article's own tool descriptions are more specific and more modest: "Check for accessibility" is described as verifying conformance to "accessibility standards, such as PDF/UA and WCAG 2.0".
So the page claims the latest guidelines in one sentence and names WCAG 2.0 as what the checker verifies in another. The article also lists the four accessibility tools Acrobat provides - Prepare for accessibility, Check for accessibility, Open accessibility report and Reading options - and notes that some items require manual fixes rather than automated ones.
Recorded as the vendor's description; we have not run Acrobat's accessibility checker and no control was run.
Standing: Re-read, and the recorded hash was not reproduced
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the raw HTTP response
- SHA-256
- 40bf792f43b27a11b2fc109093716a3f08fba47e446f44ce6de7d537ebe79bce
- Note
- real drift: a promo-source field in the page data is now populated where it was empty, +56 characters. RE-READ 2026-09-21: the quoted sentence "Since the Accessibility Check feature does not distinguish between essential and nonessential content types…" is unchanged in the new response, so the verdict stands.
How we checked
The recorded source is a description rather than a URL; it resolves to https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/create-verify-pdf-accessibility.html, which renders only 247 bytes of visible text in headless Chrome (the article body is not in the rendered document), so the claim was read from the raw HTML response: 259565 bytes saved and hashed. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of that raw response.
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“Since the Accessibility Check feature does not distinguish between essential and nonessential content types, some reported issues may not affect readability.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 21 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim, and the sentence after it is the one a reader should have: "We suggest that you review all issues to determine the ones that need correction." That turns a limitation into a workflow instruction, and it is the vendor being straight about the tool rather than overselling it. The same page, verified for a neighbouring claim earlier in this campaign, claims "the latest version" of WCAG in one sentence while describing the checker as verifying WCAG 2.0 in another, so the caveat here is consistent with a page that is honest about what its checks can and cannot do.
Recorded as the vendor's documentation; no control was run.
Standing: Re-read, and the recorded hash was not reproduced
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the raw HTTP response
- SHA-256
- 40bf792f43b27a11b2fc109093716a3f08fba47e446f44ce6de7d537ebe79bce
- Note
- same page as adobe-acrobat#2; re-read 2026-09-21 and the quoted sentence is unchanged.
How we checked
Same page and same read as the Acrobat accessibility claim verified earlier in this campaign: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/create-verify-pdf-accessibility.html, which renders 247 bytes of visible text, so it was read from the raw HTML response (259565 bytes, SHA-256 40bf792f43b27a11b2fc109093716a3f08fba47e446f44ce6de7d537ebe79bce). Two claims were read from one fetch of one page.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.
Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.
Related reading
- Checking a PDF for accessibility - what makes a PDF accessible, and how it is checked.
- Which PDF tools really redact - which tools remove the content rather than cover it.
Compared head to head
- Adobe Acrobat vs Foxit PDF Editor The two best-known paid PDF editors.
Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat
What to use instead of Adobe Acrobat The tools in this index that do the same jobs, and what separates them.