Expert's Rating
Pros
- Cross-platform solution available on desktop, mobile, and the web.
- Flexible pricing, including discounted bundles and one-time payments.
- Simple user interface that mainly highlights the commonly used tools.
Cons
- Account deletion requires contacting the customer support team.
- Some unlabeled sidebar buttons are hard to identify due to their similar, generic icons.
- Steep learning curve, and the user experience isn’t always intuitive.
Our Verdict
An excellent PDF editor for those with casual needs that’s great for those with basic workflows who don’t need power-user features.
Wondershare’s PDFelement is one of the best PDF editors available. It provides the essential document manipulation tools on all platforms at a reasonable price. While adapting to its user experience may take some getting used to, the app features a minimalistic user interface that surfaces the popular features users tend to seek.
Price and availability
PDFelement offers single- and cross-platform licenses. If you plan to use the PDF editor on your Mac exclusively, you can opt for a one-year, two-year, or lifetime license for $79.99 (£62), $109.99 (£84), or $103.99 (£80), respectively. The main difference between the subscription plans and the one-time payment is app updates. By subscribing to PDFelement, you continue to receive major updates indefinitely. Meanwhile, the lifetime license may limit you to minor patches only. Beyond that, you’re pretty much getting an identical product.
Wondershare also offers PDFelement on iOS, iPadOS, Windows, Android, and the web. So, if you prefer editing documents on multiple devices, you can opt for its all-encompassing bundle that supports all of the aforementioned platforms. At the time of writing, the one-year, two-year, and lifetime licenses similarly cost $89.99 (£70), $119.99 (£92), and $139.99 (£107).
It’s worth noting that single-platform licenses include 20GB of cloud storage, while the highlighted bundles offer 100GB. Additionally, once you run out of the 20,000 AI tokens included with your purchase, you can optionally buy 2 million more for $9.99 per month.
Find out how PDFelement compares to other PDF editors in our Best PDF Editors for Mac and Best Free PDF Editors round-ups.
First impressions
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PDFelement features a clean home page showcasing some standard PDF editing tools in the center. These include PDF conversion, optical character recognition (OCR), template selection, file compression, and more.
Meanwhile, the sidebar grants access to handy destinations, like recent files, cloud documents, tagged PDFs, and agreements you’ve sent others to sign. Notably, neither the Mac app nor the website allows you to delete your account if you decide to stop using the service, which may be a red flag for privacy-conscious users. Instead, you’re prompted to contact the customer support team, which unnecessarily complicates a fundamental action.
PDFelement features
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In terms of features, PDFelement supports most of the commonly needed PDF editing functionalities. These include text manipulation with support for various fonts, colors, and styles, in addition to image and URL insertion. You can also add, delete, and edit the document’s pages. It’s not the most advanced selection out there, but it gets the job done in casual workflows.
Perhaps PDFelement is better suited for annotation and artificial intelligence needs. The app enables users to insert text, shapes, comments, stamps, forms, checkboxes, text callouts, and more. And, for as long as you haven’t run out of AI tokens, you can ask the integrated, ChatGPT-powered assistant to summarize or translate the text. It can also insert automatic bookmarks reflecting the document’s chapters. Based on my observation, these annotation and AI features are more prominent and complex than the text manipulation tools mentioned above.
Beyond that, you can redact text, add a password to the file, convert the PDF to a Microsoft Office format, change the pages’ background, compress the size, and insert a watermark. It’s certainly not the most feature-rich PDF editor, but it does cater to casual users seeking a lightweight solution.
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Despite its minimalism, getting used to PDFelement may take some time. While the app has a modern interface, the unlabeled buttons in the editor’s sidebar can be confusing and challenging to identify. I frequently hover over them for a second to reveal their hidden tags and differentiate between their functionalities. Additionally, some features, like text editing, can sometimes be a bit unpredictable. You eventually adapt to the format, though.
Should you buy PDFelement?
Wondershare’s PDFelement is an excellent PDF editor for those with casual needs. While it can almost fully manipulate a supported document, its tools aren’t as advanced as those offered by many rival apps. Don’t get me wrong—that’s great for those with basic workflows who don’t need to be exposed to power-user features. They miss out on the endless menus and options that only bloat the software and are irrelevant to their use cases.
Based on my experience using it and considering its extensive annotation tools, PDFelement seems to cater to those who review other people’s documents and send them back for revisions. Using the software to leave feedback on existing documents feels more natural than replacing its core elements. Nevertheless, it’s a full-fledged PDF editor that can technically swing either way.
If you’re unsure if PDFelement suits your needs, you can activate a one-week free trial. Once it expires, you can pick between the available subscriptions and lifetime licenses if you choose to proceed.