Free, open-source alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat handles PDF work beyond reading: editing text, combining and splitting files, converting to and from other formats, adding signatures and running OCR on scans. The open-source tools below cover that document-preparation side on the Mac without uploading files to an online service.

OffPDF is the broader toolbox, with merging, splitting, conversion, compression, OCR and an editing workspace for text, annotations and signatures. PDFsam Basic focuses on structural jobs such as merging, splitting, rotating and extracting pages. For simply reading and marking up PDFs, the Preview app that comes with macOS already covers the basics.