PDF Expert: is it free, what PDF Expert Premium costs and a free alternative

Is PDF Expert free?

PDF Expert's listing describes the free part as reading (day, night and sepia themes, search, text to speech), annotating with highlights, shapes, notes and stamps, filling forms, and signing by drawing or from an image; scanned PDFs can be opened to fill, sign and annotate. The listing places editing under a Premium heading, so the free version is a reader and a form filler, not an editor. The most common 2026 review complaints are the price and the trial: one reviewer says they were charged $15.17 after choosing the 7-day trial, another objects to a one-time $139.99 charge for a mobile app, and others report slow syncing and buggy updates.

How much does PDF Expert cost?

PDF Expert's listing puts these under Premium: editing text, images and links, adding outlines, creating PDFs from other files, converting to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and images, merging and splitting, reordering pages, compressing, summaries and questions with the PDF Copilot assistant, redacting and password protection. One Premium covers iPhone, iPad and Mac. The US App Store lists Premium at $49.99 in several entries, a Mac & iOS purchase at $79.99, Education at $39.99, Basic at $9.99 and trial entries at $9.99 (the page shows ten purchases at a time and doesn't say which is yearly or one-time). Readdle's site shows a yearly plan and a Mac-only lifetime purchase, and gives students 30% off the annual plan after email verification. These are US App Store prices on November 2, 2026, and they may change.

Folbrio or PDF Expert: how they compare

Folbrio, made by the AppHunt team, does the headline job PDF Expert keeps in Premium: changing what a PDF says. Tap a paragraph and retype it, format words, swap or move an image, sign once with a drawn signature and drop it onto any page, reorder, rotate or delete pages, and bring in pages from another PDF. It also scans paper with the camera, and its on-device OCR turns a scan into text you can edit. It runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, is free with no account, no ads and no in-app purchases, and needs no code. The gaps are wide, though. Folbrio's listing mentions no fillable form fields, no stamps, shapes or comments, no conversion to Word or Excel, no compression, no redaction or passwords, no AI assistant and no syncing between devices, since libraries are kept per device. It accepts only unencrypted PDFs, refusing files over 40 MB or 200 pages, and it has 1 rating against PDF Expert's 216,472. If you fill forms and annotate all day, PDF Expert is the better tool.

Other free alternatives to PDF Expert

• 
  Adobe Acrobat Reader · 656K ratings

  Filling in and signing forms for free

• 
  iLovePDF · 52K ratings

  Merging, splitting and compressing on the go

• 
  PDF Editor · 29K ratings

  Basic markup and signing with files kept local

• 
  Forma · 26K ratings

  Changing the wording of a PDF on your phone

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About PDF Expert

PDF Expert, from Readdle Technologies Limited, is a PDF reader and editor with 216,472 ratings averaging 4.7 in the US App Store. It works on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro, and beyond editing it handles forms, signatures, OCR on scans and its PDF Copilot assistant. It requires iOS 16.0 or later and speaks 10 languages, and its latest update, version 7.26.3, came out on October 22, 2026. It suits people who work in PDFs daily across several Apple devices and accept a subscription.

PDF Expert: Editor & Reader on the App Store ↗

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