Best Free PDF Tools in 2024: Online and Desktop

Why Free PDF Tools Are Genuinely Useful

Adobe Acrobat Pro costs around $240/year — a worthwhile investment for heavy users but overkill for occasional PDF tasks. The good news: the free PDF tool ecosystem has matured significantly. For most common tasks — merging, compressing, converting, and even basic editing — free tools do the job well.

This guide covers the best free options across categories, clearly indicating what each tool does and where it falls short.

Online PDF Tools (No Installation Required)

Online tools are ideal for quick, one-off tasks. They work in any browser on any OS.

Tools of PDF (toolsofpdf.com)

A clean, privacy-focused online suite covering the most common PDF tasks: compress, merge, split, convert to/from Word, add page numbers, protect, watermark, and more. No account required for most features. Files are processed securely and deleted after use.

Best for: Quick conversions, compression, and merges without installing software.

Smallpdf

One of the most popular online PDF platforms. Covers 20+ tasks: compress, merge, split, convert, e-sign, and more. Free tier limits you to 2 tasks per hour.

Pros: Clean interface, fast processing, good quality. Cons: Free tier limitations; requires account for some features.

ILovePDF

Strong multi-tool platform with a generous free tier. Features include merge, split, compress, repair, PDF to Word/Excel/PowerPoint/JPG, and OCR.

Best for: Batch operations — it handles multiple files in one job.

PDF2Go

Comprehensive conversion platform with unusually good free tier. Supports PDF to/from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, HTML, and more. Also includes OCR, compress, and merge.

Best for: Format conversions, especially less common ones.

Sejda PDF

Generous free tier: 3 tasks per hour, up to 200 pages or 50MB. Includes an online PDF editor (limited), compress, merge, split, watermark, crop, and more.

Best for: Online PDF editing (adding text, signatures, form filling).

Free Desktop PDF Viewers

Adobe Acrobat Reader (Windows/Mac/Linux)

The standard free viewer. Includes annotation tools (highlight, sticky notes, drawing), form filling, and basic digital signature support.

Not free: Editing, OCR, compression, conversion.

Foxit PDF Reader (Windows/Mac)

A fast, lightweight alternative to Acrobat Reader with similar annotation capabilities and a slightly cleaner interface.

Sumatra PDF (Windows)

Extremely lightweight and fast (under 10MB). Perfect for reading — minimal features but instant loading.

Best for: Anyone who just needs to read PDFs quickly without bloat.

Okular (Linux/Windows)

KDE's document viewer supports PDF, EPUB, CBR, and more. Solid annotation tools and good integration with Linux desktops.

PDF.js (Browser)

Mozilla's open-source PDF renderer powers Firefox's built-in viewer. Accessible as a standalone web app at mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/. No installation needed if you use Firefox.

Free Desktop PDF Editors

True free PDF editors (that can modify existing content) are rare. Most "free editors" allow only annotations or form filling.

LibreOffice Draw (Windows/Mac/Linux)

LibreOffice can open PDFs as editable vector drawings. Text and graphics are individual objects — you can edit, move, or delete them. Quality varies depending on PDF complexity.

Limitation: Doesn't handle complex formatting or embedded fonts as cleanly as Acrobat.

PDFsam Basic (Windows/Mac/Linux)

Free, open-source tool focused on splitting and merging PDFs. Extremely reliable for these tasks.

Best for: Splitting PDFs by page range, merging multiple PDFs, and rotating pages.

GIMP (Windows/Mac/Linux)

GIMP can open and edit PDF pages as images. Each page becomes a rasterized image you can edit graphically. Export back to PDF.

Limitation: Results in image-only PDFs (no selectable text). Use only for image-heavy PDFs or cover page editing.

Free PDF Compression Tools

PDF Compressor (online, pdfcompressor.com)

Focuses purely on compression. No account needed. Handles colour and greyscale compression efficiently.

Ghostscript (command line, free/open-source)

The most powerful free compression option. Fully configurable quality settings. Requires command line comfort.

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -o compressed.pdf input.pdf

Presets: /screen (72 DPI), /ebook (150 DPI), /printer (300 DPI), /prepress (high quality, larger file).

Free OCR Tools

OCR converts scanned PDFs to searchable text.

Google Drive (Free)

Upload a scanned PDF → right-click → Open with Google Docs. Google performs OCR automatically and creates an editable Google Doc with the text.

Accuracy: Good for clean scans, fair for handwriting.

ABBYY FineReader Online (Free Tier)

Generous free tier with high-quality OCR. Supports 190+ languages. Upload a scanned PDF, download a searchable PDF or Word file.

Best for: High-accuracy OCR for important documents.

Tesseract (Command Line, Open Source)

The open-source OCR engine used by many applications. Excellent for developers or batch processing.

tesseract input.tiff output pdf

Adobe Acrobat Reader (Limited Free OCR)

Free Acrobat Reader includes basic OCR (Enhance Scans) in limited form. Acrobat Pro unlocks full batch OCR.

Free PDF to Word Converters

Microsoft Word (Online / Desktop)

Word 2013+ can open a PDF and convert it to an editable .docx document natively. File → Open → select your PDF. Free if you have Word.

Quality: Good for simple PDFs; complex layouts may need cleanup.

Google Docs

Upload a PDF to Google Drive → right-click → Open with Google Docs → File → Download → Word. Free, no software needed.

Online converters

Smallpdf, ILovePDF, PDF2Go, and Tools of PDF all offer free PDF to Word conversion with good results for standard documents.

Free PDF Creation Tools

Nearly everything creates PDFs for free today:

• Windows / Mac: Print → Save as PDF (built into the OS)
• Google Docs: File → Download → PDF
• LibreOffice: File → Export as PDF
• Microsoft Office: File → Export → Create PDF/XPS

For programmatic PDF creation:

• ReportLab (Python): Open-source PDF generation library
• FPDF (PHP): Lightweight free PDF library
• jsPDF (JavaScript): Client-side PDF generation

Free Digital Signature Tools

DocuSign (Free Tier)

3 signature requests free per month. Industry-standard e-signature platform.

HelloSign / Dropbox Sign (Free Tier)

3 signature requests per month free. Clean interface, legally binding.

Adobe Acrobat Reader

Sign PDFs with a typed name, drawn signature, or image of your handwritten signature. Free, unlimited. Not legally certified but accepted for many purposes.

PDF24 (Free, no limits)

German privacy-focused PDF tool with a free e-signature feature. No account required.

Free PDF Merge and Split

• PDFsam Basic — excellent desktop merger/splitter, open-source
• Tools of PDF — online, no account needed
• ILovePDF — good batch handling
• Ghostscript — command line merge: gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o merged.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf

Choosing the Right Free Tool

Summary

The free PDF tool landscape covers almost every common PDF need. For online convenience, Tools of PDF, Smallpdf, and ILovePDF handle most tasks without installation. For desktop power, LibreOffice, PDFsam Basic, and Ghostscript provide robust open-source options. The main gap in the free tier is professional PDF editing (modifying existing text and layout) — for that, a brief trial of Acrobat Pro or a one-time purchase like PDF-XChange Editor is worth considering.