Nitro PDF Pro review: A top Acrobat alternative

At a glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

• Intuitive Microsoft Office ribbon-style interface
• Excellent document conversion
• Multi-platform

Cons

• Expensive
• May be more than casual users need

Our Verdict

Nitro PDF Pro is one of the most full-featured PDF editors available and the strongest alternative to Adobe Acrobat DC.

Best Prices Today: Nitro PDF Pro

As Adobe Acrobat alternatives go, Nitro Pro sits near the top of the heap. The multi-platform editor is rich with advanced tools and business-ready features but intuitive enough for even beginners to use. All that power comes at a premium, though, making Nitro Pro 13 one of the pricier PDF editors in our roundup.

The features that have long endeared Nitro Pro beloved to users are all still here in Nitro Pro 13. You get a complete set of content editing tools; review and markup features; form fill and signing capability; and multiple security options for sensitive documents including permissions, password protection, and data redaction. It’s easy to add interactive elements like hyperlinks, images, or document files to your PDFs. You can also add, remove, and edit bates numbering to legal documents.

This review is part of our best PDF editors roundup. Go there to learn about our testing and how all the competitors performed. 

Michael Ansaldo/IDG

Creating and converting PDFs is one of the most popular uses for PDF editors. Nitro Pro excels at both, quickly transforming files while faithfully preserving their formatting. The editor can create PDFs from over 300 different file formats, as well as export them to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. It also supports OCR, allowing you to create searchable PDFs directly from your scanner or save documents to PDF from any print enabled application. Documents can be saved as PDF/A files for long term archiving and file storage.

One of Nitro Pro 13’s strengths is its Microsoft Office-style ribbon interface that groups features into task-based tabs. With clear labelling such as Convert, Review, Page Layout, Forms, Share, and so on, every tool is exactly where you would expect it to be. Because of this, document workflows feel simpler and more seamless than in many other editors.

Michael Ansaldo/IDG

As mentioned, Nitro Pro 13 isn’t cheap. For both Windows and Mac versions, a one-time license costs $179.99 per user. That price applies for up to 20 users. Package discounts are available, but these are different for each platform. For Windows, you can buy three licenses and get one free or eight and get two free. For the Mac, Nitro offers 20 percent off when buying five licenses and 24 percent off for 10. There isn’t a free version of Nitro Pro but a free trial that watermarks your saved PDFs is available.

Final thoughts

Nitro Pro 13 provides everything you need to work with PDFs whether you need to make some simple modifications to a file or are creating documents from scratch. It’s simply one of the most advanced PDF editors available and the strongest contender to Adobe Acrobat DC right now. It makes sense, then, to put it at the top of your shopping list of Acrobat alternatives.

Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.