Adobe Acrobat Pro vs Stirling-PDF
Acrobat Pro is a paid Adobe subscription; Stirling-PDF gives you 60+ PDF tools for free, with paid Team and Enterprise tiers for organisations.
Pick Adobe Acrobat Pro if…
You edit, sign, redact and convert PDFs often, or your workplace expects Adobe tools, and you are happy to pay US$19.99/month on an annual plan billed monthly.
Pick Stirling-PDF if…
You want a free, open-core PDF toolkit you can run on your own computer or server, or you need an API to automate PDF jobs.
Price
- Paid
- Freemium
- Open source
Starting price
Free plan
Open source
Works on
| Feature | Adobe's paid PDF tool for editing, OCR, signatures, conversion and redaction on desktop, web and mobile. | Open-core PDF editor with 60+ tools, available as desktop app, web app or self-hosted server. |
|---|---|---|
| Price |
|
|
| Starting price | US$19.99/mo, annual plan billed monthly | $99/month (Team plan, 100 users included) |
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Open source | No | Yes |
| Works on | Windows, macOS, Web | Web, Windows, macOS, Linux, API |
| Try Adobe Acrobat Pro (opens the Adobe Acrobat Pro website in a new tab) | Try Stirling-PDF (opens the Stirling-PDF website in a new tab) |
Adobe Acrobat Pro is US$19.99 per month on an annual plan billed monthly, US$239.88 per year prepaid, or US$29.99 per month on a monthly plan. It edits text and images, runs OCR on scans, requests and tracks e-signatures, converts to and from Word, PowerPoint and Excel, and redacts content. It has no free plan beyond the Reader, which only opens and views PDFs.
Stirling-PDF's Free plan is $0 per month with 60+ PDF tools, 1,000 monthly credits, and web, desktop and self-hosted use. Its README describes editing, signing, redacting, converting and automating PDFs, with REST APIs for nearly all tools. Most of the code is MIT-licensed, though some directories carry separate proprietary licences.
For teams, Stirling's Team plan is $99 per month for 100 users, with SSO and central control of the tool catalog. Enterprise is custom priced and adds air-gapped deployment, SCIM, audit logs and SLAs. Acrobat's teams plan is US$23.99 per month per licence on an annual plan billed monthly.
The pages gathered do not compare feature depth in editing or OCR accuracy. If you depend on Acrobat-specific workflows, trial both on your own files.
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Last updated 17 October 2026. How we make money