Free PDF readers that offer a wealth of features, including editing, annotating and blocking security threats.
The best free PDF readers allow you to read, edit or annotate PDF files and block security threats. These days, PDF documents are being used everywhere. That’s because they can be opened on any opening system, are easy to attach to an email or a website, and have the advantage of not being easily altered. And, so everybody uses them at work, in schools, and even for digital copies of the manuals for your peripherals and devices. While simply opening a PDF as a read-only file is straightforward – you can just do it using your favorite web browser – editing, altering or converting one will require a dedicated PDF reader. Luckily, the best free PDF readers out there are just as capable as their paid counterparts, and they won’t cost you a dime or force you into a monthly subscription. To help you find the best one for what you need, we’ve highlighted five of the best free PDF readers for Windows and Mac. These should see you through advanced tasks like signing or editing documents, merging PDFs or converting between document formats. For more flexibility, take a look at our guide to the best free PDF editors, which make editing a PDF as straightforward as tweaking a Word document. Additionally, we’ve featured the best PDF to PowerPoint converters. Adobe’s free PDF reader isn’t the most lightweight download, but this software does a lot of things well. If you already use other Adobe products, you can connect Acrobat Reader DC to Adobe’s storage cloud. Alternatively, you can save PDFs to or open them from cloud services including Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Box. What really sets this free PDF reader apart is that it can handle opening multiple large files at once. That means you can read through and annotate thick documents in this program without worrying that it will crash on you. The layout arranges individual documents in a tab view, so it feels a lot like the experience you’d get looking through PDFs in your web browser. Acrobat Reader DC includes just about all the annotation tools you could want, making this hands down the best free PDF reader.
