Nitro PDF Pro (Opens in a new tab) – Now there's a powerful name. The PDF editor is positioned as an essential tool for small businesses and individuals, and includes a lot of must-have features like PDF conversions, electronic signatures, OCR. Ideal for improving workflow efficiency and productivity with a single tool.
Available for Windows and Mac, there is also a version of the PDF editor app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
Nitro PDF Pro 13: Pricing
- One-time purchase with volume license available
Nitro PDF Pro is cross-platform software for small businesses and individuals. If you're not a fan of subscription services (you know you're in trouble when automakers start getting involved) and push you to find the best alternatives to Adobe Acrobat, you'll appreciate this PDF editor app right away: when you buy a license, it is a single payment.
The downside is that it is not cheap and you have to pay for each device you want to use this software on. Whether you need a PDF editor for Mac or Windows, the price per license is the same: €180.
Interestingly, bundle discounts vary depending on your platform: With Windows, you can buy three and get one free, or eight and get two free. On Mac, you get a 20% discount when you buy five licenses and a 24% discount when you buy ten.
Why that is, no one knows. But an alternative to Creative Cloud and other subscription plans is always welcome.
Nitro PDF Pro 13: interface and experience
- Clean and does not interfere
Launch the software, open an existing PDF, and you'll see the Nitro PDF Pro interface.
The layout is pretty clean and simple: all the tools you need are at the top, in a row of large icons showing the main tools, with a toolbar below that shows the additional tools (which are grayed out if the main tool selected does not support this function).
There is a sidebar on the left side, which shows thumbnails of all the pages of your PDF files by default, but you can change this to show other useful information, like your annotations or included attachments, among others.
- Interface and experience: 4/5
Nitro PDF Pro 13: Tools
- Pretty much everything you need to annotate and edit a PDF
The purpose of Nitro PDF Pro is to allow you to edit PDF documents and it comes with all the tools you could expect.
Take online collaboration, for example. You have many ways to leave notes on the pages. There is a highlighting tool that allows you to highlight text in a variety of colors. You'll find four default ringtones, with the option to create three custom ones if you wish. You can also underline, strikethrough, or add a doodle below any part of the PDF you're working on.
This is all very useful, but it can be difficult to convey exactly the changes you want to see with a bit of highlighter and a few lines over the text. This is where annotation tools come in.
Various text boxes reside here, ranging from a simple box to a comment, a thought bubble, a note (think of it like a folding post-it), and a few others. More than enough for you to fill out a PDF with as many comments as needed to convey what you need to change to other team members.
Of course, it is also possible to change the content of an existing PDF using the "Correct Text" tool. Select a word, phrase, or multiple paragraphs and this tool will turn your selection into an editable text box.
We ran into an issue with the PDFs we experimented with: converting a section to editable text affected line spacing, often causing the paragraph to overlap the next. We tried with several PDFs. We found the same problem with all of them.
Although there are many tools available to modify the text, such as changing its color, making it italic, changing its alignment, etc., we could not find any that change the line spacing. There is other competing software that is better at preserving the look of a document, such as EaseUS PDF Editor.
Nitro PDF Pro 13: PDF Creation
- Start from scratch and convert to other formats
Editing PDF files is one thing, but like so many others, Nitro PDF Pro allows you to create documents from scratch, using all the tools mentioned above and more. This even includes creating forms, something that Adobe Acrobat can struggle to present. This is a useful addition as it keeps you in one app when working on anything PDF related.
But people don't always work in just one PDF editing app, and that's where Nitro's format conversion shines.
Just like similar PDF editing software, think Foxit PDF Editor or Readdle PDF Expert, Nitro PDF Pro can convert PDF files to other formats and vice versa.
However, it does not do this via a dedicated "Convert" command. Instead, the process is much more intuitive: need to convert Word to PDF? Go to File > Open, locate it, and Nitro will automatically convert it when opened in the software.
Nitro PDF Pro supports a wide variety of file formats, including images. When it finds a file that does not contain selectable text, it offers to start the optical character recognition (OCR) process. Select the language the document is in and Nitro will get to work. We found the results very acceptable and of course they are editable.
If you need to convert PDF to a different format, just go to File > Export. You have a few options at your disposal, like Microsoft Office files – Nitro is easily one of the best PDF to Excel and PDF to PowerPoint converters on the market. There's also RTF, TXT, a handful of image formats, and PDF/A, which is used for archival purposes.
Of course, that's not all you can do with Nitro PDF Pro: there are other features, including the ability to merge PDF files, from email to text files and spreadsheets, condense them into a single searchable PDF) , sign documents digitally and create tables of contents.
Nitro PDF Pro: Dashboard
PricingNo subscription - just a single perpetual license4/5Interface and experienceClean, modern and easy to use4/5ToolsHas pretty much everything you need to edit and annotate documents4/5PDF creationGreat creation and conversion tools4/5I should buy?
Buy it if...
You need a feature-rich PDF editor
Nitro PDF Pro gives you many tools that you would need to edit, annotate, or even create a PDF document from scratch. You can import documents directly from your scanner and its OCR capabilities are excellent. If you or your business often need to edit and annotate PDF documents, it may be worth downloading the free trial version and checking it out.
You are an occasional user or your needs are simple
If your needs are simpler and you just want to scan a PDF, then Nitro PDF Pro may be overkill. It might also not be ideal if you want to edit the content of a PDF without changing its formatting, especially line spacing.
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