PDF-XChange Editor
Windows-only PDF editor with a large free tier and perpetual licences.
Operated by Tracker Software Products
Where your files are processed
Mixed — depends on version and feature
The vendor's own documentation separates them. On the device: PDF-XChange Editor on Windows. On their servers: Optional AI providers. A single answer for the whole product would be wrong for one of them.
Desktop core processing happens on the machine, and that is a statement about the desktop application rather than about the product as a whole: the optional AI features send data to configured providers, and the network behaviour has not been tested. Installed or portable architecture is not used here to assert that no vendor service or network traffic exists.
What it does
PDF-XChange Editor is a Windows desktop PDF editor from PDF-XChange Co Ltd, also known as Tracker Software. It is unusually feature-dense: annotation and measurement tools, bookmarks and page manipulation, form filling and creation, conversion to and from Word, Excel and PowerPoint plus PDF/A and PDF/X, OCR, document comparison, file-size optimisation and a FreeSign tool. The free download leaves roughly seventy per cent of features unrestricted; the rest are licensed.
Best for: Windows users who want a capable desktop editor with a substantial documented free feature set and the option to license the rest.
Worth knowing: Windows 10 or later only. Free and evaluation use stamps watermarks on output from licensed features, and the strongest features — the enhanced OCR engine, fillable form creation, document comparison — need the more expensive Editor Plus licence. There are no refunds once a licence key is issued. The vendor describes more than seventy percent of functionality as free, which is an approximate vendor statement rather than a measured capability score. Editor and Editor Plus differ on enhanced OCR, forms and comparison entitlement. Redaction is presented as the documented marking, applying and sanitising workflows with untested output, consistent with the not-determined redaction field. PDF-Tools batch documentation belongs to that product rather than to the Editor. The free watermark state is conditional: unlicensed paid features add demo stamps, while the supported free features do not universally watermark output.
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
- Windows
- Website
- pdf-xchange.com
- Requires an account
- No
- Free tier
- Yes
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Not verified
- Data residency
- Not verified
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- No
- Licence
- proprietary, perpetual per-user licence
- Redaction
- Not determined
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 518 ms 16 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
Why we have not determined this
What that does not establish: Downgraded from removes_content on 2026-09-22. The vendor’s manual is JavaScript-only at both the current and the previous URL, and neither is archived, so we could not read any statement about the mechanism. The guide’s tier note separately records that redaction is a paid feature and is absent from the free version — a fact about the edition, not about whether content is removed.
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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“Download the free version and test out the software - 70% of features are unrestricted.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence appears unaltered in the page's download prompt. The sentence below it is the one a buyer needs and the claim omits it: there are two licence tiers, PDF-XChange Editor and PDF-XChange Editor Plus, and the extra features "are not available in an unrestricted capacity with a regular PDF-XChange Editor license". So the 70% figure describes the free version, and the remaining 30% is not simply unlocked by the cheapest paid licence — some of it sits behind Editor Plus. A reader who took "70% free, buy to get the rest" would be wrong about the middle tier. Recorded as the vendor's own wording; no download was made and no control was run.
Standing: Re-read: the text is unchanged, but the page publishes values that move
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 1cb98e4dc99f57e520bfb8e97289ebc1c198f1599e090ae70d7299c34881f584
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://www.pdf-xchange.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor 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-www-pdf-xchange-com-product-pdf-xchange-editor-0310a7c8.txt.
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“PDF-XChange Editor has more than 400 features”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence continues "that you can use to perform a huge range of operations on PDF documents, as detailed below". "More than 400 features" is a count the vendor publishes and a reader cannot easily check; the page does not enumerate them in a countable form on this page. It is worth reading beside the same page's "70% of features are unrestricted" claim recorded earlier, because the two use the same underlying feature list for different purposes — one to impress, one to describe a trial. Recorded as the vendor's wording.
Standing: Re-read: the text is unchanged, but the page publishes values that move
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 1cb98e4dc99f57e520bfb8e97289ebc1c198f1599e090ae70d7299c34881f584
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://www.pdf-xchange.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor 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-www-pdf-xchange-com-product-pdf-xchange-editor-0310a7c8.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.
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