PDF Expert
Readdle's PDF editor and reader for Mac, iPad and iPhone.
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 text, images and links, page organisation and merging, conversion to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and JPG, electronic signing, OCR of scans, and an AI copilot. The free download gives a limited feature set; editing, conversion, OCR and AI sit behind weekly, annual or lifetime premium plans.
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 — no Windows, Android or web version. The headline editing, conversion and OCR features need a subscription, and the one-off lifetime licence is explicitly Mac-only, so iPhone and iPad users are on recurring billing. Editing can be licensed perpetually on Mac, so headline features do not universally require a subscription, and lifetime Mac cover is kept distinct from subscription coverage. Older support pages disagree about shared Mac and iOS licences, so current plan terms are used and the legacy licensing scope is flagged, with account requirements explained per activation and cross-platform use.
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
- Redaction
- Removes the content
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 153 ms 16 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.