PDF Expert
Readdle's PDF editor and reader for Mac, iPad and iPhone.
Operated by Readdle Limited
Opens the vendor's own site.
Jobs covered
Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.
Edit
Browse all edit toolsediting PDFs with PDF Expert, where the Edit PDF page documents modifying existing text directly in the PDF just as in a word processor, fixing typos, adding paragraphs and changing fonts, adding, replacing and resizing images, adding links to external sites or other pages and to images, annotations and comments, form filling, page organisation and merging, and redaction that the vendor describes as permanently deleting selected content; the scope records the documented existing-text, image, link, annotation, form, page and redaction editing on the Mac, iPad and iPhone apps, makes no layout-fidelity guarantee for edited content, and leaves OCR and conversion to their own jobs
Sign
Browse all sign toolssigning PDFs with PDF Expert, where the Sign PDF page documents creating a personal electronic signature by typing a name and having it converted to handwriting or by drawing it with the trackpad, and signing PDFs across Mac, iPad and iPhone with signature sync; the page calls the feature an electronic signature and does not document certificate-based or cryptographic digital signing, so the scope records the visual electronic signature and makes no certificate-authority, cryptographic-validation, timestamping or legal-validity guarantee
Merge
Browse all merge toolsmerging entire PDF documents or selected pages from multiple PDFs in PDF Expert on Apple devices; the product is distributed through the Apple App Store and Mac App Store, and no other native-platform merge claim is made.
Convert
Browse all convert toolsconverting PDFs with PDF Expert, where the Convert PDFs page documents conversion to and from Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, JPG and PNG images and TXT text, including PDF to Word, PDF to JPG or PNG, PDF to Excel, PDF to PPT, PDF to text and JPG, PNG, Word, PPT and Excel to PDF; Readdle's Privacy Notice for the App says files are temporarily stored for up to three hours for the file conversion functionality. The scope records the documented conversion directions and the temporary server-side processing for conversion, makes no fidelity guarantee for converted documents and does not claim OCR-based conversion beyond the OCR job
OCR
Browse all ocr toolsMac 3.0 and later; iOS OCR is not yet available per the vendor documentation
Compress
Browse all compress toolscompressing PDFs with PDF Expert, where the Compress PDF how-to documents a PDF compressor with Lossless, High and Medium quality options, says Lossless is intended to reduce file size without any loss in quality, and High and Medium trade some detail for smaller files; the page is a vendor how-to and this audit did not measure the output. The scope records the three documented levels and the vendor's lossless wording, and makes no percentage-reduction, independently verified lossless or universal quality guarantee
Where your files are processed
Mixed - depends on version and feature
The vendor's own documentation separates them. On the device: PDF Expert on Mac and iOS. On their servers: Conversion, AI and cloud sync features. A single answer for the whole product would be wrong for one of them.
It depends on the feature rather than on the product. Installed editing on Mac and iOS works on the device, and that is separate from the conversion uploads, the AI providers and any cloud sync the account has enabled, each of which the vendor’s own privacy notice describes as sending data to their servers.
A categorical no-server badge cannot sit above that caveat, so the processing state is recorded as mixed by feature. Conversion retention is attributed to the vendor’s notice rather than to a deletion test we ran.
What it does
PDF Expert is Readdle's Apple-only PDF application for macOS, iPadOS and iOS. It covers reading, annotation and markup, form filling, editing existing text, images and links, page organisation and merging, conversion to and from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPG, PNG and TXT, compression with Lossless, High and Medium levels, electronic signing, OCR of scans on Mac, and a PDF Copilot AI assistant.
The free download gives a limited feature set and a 7-day trial; premium is sold as a Yearly plan at GBP 72.99 billed annually or a one-time Lifetime plan at GBP 129.99 on Mac only. The current versions are 7.26.2 on iOS and 3.13.4 on Mac.
Editing works on the device, while conversion temporarily stores files on Readdle servers for up to three hours and AI features use local models and/or third-party providers.
Best for
Apple device users who want a fast, well-designed PDF editor that behaves consistently across Mac, iPad and iPhone.
Worth knowing
Apple only: the Mac, iPad and iPhone apps are the only native surfaces, and the Mac App Store and iOS App Store are the places the product is distributed. The current GBP pricing page lists a Yearly plan at GBP 72.99 billed annually and a one-time Lifetime plan at GBP 129.99 that is Mac only; the previously recorded GBP 4.99 weekly plan is not on the current page, and the iOS and Mac App Store USD prices are separate store prices that should not be converted.
The free download is a limited free tier with a 7-day trial rather than the full editing product, and the lifetime licence does not cover iPhone and iPad use. Editing existing PDF text, images and links is a supported desktop and mobile feature, not just annotation; the vendor does not publish a fidelity guarantee for edited layout.
Conversion is documented to and from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPG, PNG and TXT, and Readdle's privacy notice says files are temporarily stored for up to three hours for conversion, so conversion is a cloud-processing feature rather than a local-only one. Compression offers Lossless, High and Medium levels and the vendor claims the Lossless option reduces size without quality loss, but this record does not turn that into an independently verified percentage or guarantee.
Signing is a personal electronic signature created by typing or drawing, not a certificate-based digital signature, and no certificate-authority or validation claim is made. PDF Copilot and other AI features are off by default, may use local models and/or third-party providers such as Azure OpenAI or OpenAI, and AI providers may retain inputs for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring; AI is therefore not treated as a local-only feature.
OCR is scoped to Mac as previously recorded, and no claim is made for iOS OCR.
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
- macOS · iOS
- Website
- pdfexpert.com
- Requires an account
- Not verified
- Free tier
- Yes
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Not verified
- Data residency
- Multiple regions
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- No
- Licence
-
Proprietary.
Proprietary. Readdle Limited, company number 630281, Glandore Business Centres, 26-27 Fitzwilliam Place, Fitzwilliam Hall, Dublin 2, D02T292, Ireland, is the controller and provider named in the PDF Expert Terms of Service and Privacy Notice for the App, last updated 12 August 2026.
The Apple App Store and Mac App Store list the seller as Readdle Technologies Limited, a related Readdle entity used for store distribution. PDF Expert is sold as a free download with a 7-day trial and premium subscription or lifetime purchase: the current GBP pricing page lists a Yearly plan at GBP 72.99 billed annually (displayed as GBP 1.40 per week) and a one-time Lifetime plan at GBP 129.99 on Mac only, with a 30-day money-back guarantee and a student discount; the iOS and Mac App Store listings show separate App Store in-app purchase and app prices in USD, which are not converted here.
No open-source licence or source distribution is published.
- Redaction
- Removes the content
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 445 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.
“Blackout removes the selected content and puts a black box in its place, Erase removes the text and leaves an empty space in its place. … Please note that there is no possibility to restore the redacted text after saving the file.”
What that does not establish
The vendor’s own help article, not a test we ran. Its opening sentence says the tool "hide[s]" sensitive information, which is covering language; the steps quoted above say removal, and the steps are the specific account.
Two further limits: redaction is a subscription feature, and the app "automatically permanently saves changes" when the file is closed - so what a user gets is not what an unsaved experiment shows.
https://support.readdle.com/pdfexpert/en_US/edit-pdfs/remove-sensitive-content
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.
-
“30 Million Users worldwide”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed: the page states "30 Million / Users worldwide" in a block of three statistics alongside an Apple "App of the Year Runner-up" badge and an Editors' Choice badge. The claim joins the two halves of the statistic into one sentence, which is a fair reading of the markup, and it is recorded as the vendor's figure rather than as an established count - no source, date or definition accompanies it, and Readdle publishes no user numbers that could corroborate it independently.
This is the same category as Adobe's "5 million companies" and SignWell's business count, verified in this batch: a social-proof number that a reader should treat as the vendor's own.
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 text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 274f2a3d304443f65cdb6b5a359da8daafdbcd5b0e6271d45b8986753b82e34d
How we checked
Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://pdfexpert.com/pricing re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-pdfexpert-com-pricing-22c31744.txt.
-
“PDF Expert puts Adobe Acrobat to shame.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim, and where it appears is the finding: the sentence is inside a `quote-block` element, directly after a statistics block, and no attribution appears in the markup around it - no name, no publication, no link. So the page presents a negative claim about a named competitor in the visual form of a testimonial while leaving it unattributed, which reads as the vendor's own statement dressed as somebody else's.
That is worth recording precisely, and without editorialising: the sentence is on the page, it is the vendor's page, and nobody else is credited with it. This is the second competitor comparison in this tier after Power PDF's, and both name Adobe Acrobat.
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 text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 274f2a3d304443f65cdb6b5a359da8daafdbcd5b0e6271d45b8986753b82e34d
How we checked
Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://pdfexpert.com/pricing re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-pdfexpert-com-pricing-22c31744.txt.
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
- Which PDF tools really redact - which tools remove the content rather than cover it.