9 Best Free PDF Editors for Windows of 2026

PDFgear covers the task most people mean by editing a PDF: changing the words on the page. Its Windows app edits existing text and lets you adjust fonts, sizes and colors without a round trip through Word, and images can be moved, resized or replaced. Around that sit OCR for scanned files, annotation with highlights, comments and drawing tools, form filling that works even on flat PDFs with no fields, and signatures you can draw, type or upload and stamp across several pages at once. Page tools delete, insert, reorder, rotate, extract and crop, and conversion runs between PDF and the main Office formats in batches. PDFgear says the Windows app is free, needs no sign-up and adds no watermarks, and that reading, editing and printing happen locally. The trade-off is the AI assistant: it needs a connection and may send document content to an outside AI provider once you consent, so keep it off for sensitive files.

PDF24 Creator is the free toolkit to install when a whole office needs PDF tools and nobody wants to manage licenses. PDF24 states it can be used without charge or restrictions, including by companies and public bodies, and that it runs offline so files stay on the PC. The drag and drop creator merges and splits files and adds, removes, extracts, rotates and sorts pages. A virtual PDF printer turns anything printable into a PDF, with multiple printers and saved profiles for repeated jobs. Separate tools handle compression, OCR, overlaying a document onto digital letter paper, screen capture to PDF and scanner import. Format options cover PDF/A and PDF/X, passwords, watermarks, page numbers and signatures, and a File Explorer context menu brings batch jobs to the right click. It is Windows only, and its feature list focuses on assembling and converting PDFs rather than rewriting text inside them, so pair it with PDFgear for text edits.

ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors is a full office suite that treats PDF as a first-class format. ONLYOFFICE says you can edit PDF text, images and layout, highlight, annotate and draw, fill out and create fillable forms, convert PDFs to editable documents and protect files with passwords and digital signatures. Because the same app also opens DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files in tabs, it suits people who move between a Word file and the PDF made from it. The download page lists installers for Windows 11 down to Windows 7, a Windows 11 ARM64 build and even a legacy package for Windows XP and Vista, under the AGPLv3 license. You can work offline or connect Dropbox, Nextcloud or ownCloud to co-edit. The cost is size: the main x64 package is 286 MB, far heavier than a dedicated PDF tool. Optional AI tools need you to connect a provider.

PDF-XChange Editor gives free users more tools than most paid apps, with one catch to understand before you start. The vendor says about 70% of features are unrestricted in the free version, which it permits for both private and commercial use. The remaining licensed features are marked in the menus and still run, but they stamp a watermark on the output, and that watermark cannot be removed later without a license. So test on a copy, as the vendor itself recommends. The feature list is long: text editing with find and replace, watermarks, backgrounds, barcodes, scan deskewing and enhancement, page rasterizing, and cloud connections such as OneDrive for Business. It supports Windows 10 and later. If you outgrow the free version, a single user Editor license started at USD $62 when we checked, with Editor Plus at $79, both perpetual with optional maintenance renewals. The interface is dense and suits people who use PDFs daily.

Foxit PDF Reader is a free reader that goes further than viewing, and that matters for the many PDF jobs that are really form filling and signing. Foxit says it fills both standard AcroForms and XFA forms, a format some free tools cannot handle, and adds digital signatures. Review tools cover comments, highlights and notes, and security settings can restrict documents to trusted sources and be locked by an administrator. For IT teams, an MSI installer makes rollouts across many PCs simple, and Foxit lists support for Windows 10 and 11 plus verification for Citrix. The limit is real editing: rewriting text, converting and managing PDFs belong to Foxit PDF Editor, which Foxit prices at $129.99 per user per year, with monthly billing from $10.99. If your work is mostly forms, signatures and comments, the free reader is enough. If you need to change text, PDFgear does it for free.

Microsoft Edge is the zero-install option for the simplest PDF edits. Its built-in PDF reader lets you highlight, mark up, add text and save your changes, and Microsoft's own FAQ explains that the Add text tool places a text box anywhere on the page that you can move and restyle. That covers filling in a flat form, adding a note or initialing a page. You can save a copy with your highlights and markings, translate selected text in a side pane across more than 70 languages, and ask Copilot in Edge for a summary. Long files get search and a table of contents. What Edge does not list is changing the existing words in a PDF, or page tools such as merging, splitting and converting, so it is a markup tool rather than a full editor. Microsoft also notes that features vary by device, market and browser version. For anything beyond notes and added text, move to PDFgear or PDF24 Creator.

PDFsam Basic does one family of jobs and does them in detail: rearranging whole pages across files. It has six tools, merge, split, mix, rotate, extract pages and insert pages, and it runs offline on your own computer with no watermarks and no size limits. Merge is the deepest module. You can take whole files or page ranges written as 1-10, 14, 25-, decide whether bookmarks are merged, discarded or rebuilt with one entry per file, handle AcroForms with clashing field names, and add a clickable table of contents at the front. Split can break a file after every page, at chosen page numbers, every n pages or into pieces of a given size. The project has been open source since 2006 and publishes its source code, which matters to anyone careful about document privacy. It does not touch the content of a page, so text, images, OCR and forms need another tool from this list.

LibreOffice Draw is the open source route for people who already use LibreOffice or want no commercial software on their PC. The Document Foundation describes Draw as a free PDF editor: you open the PDF in Draw and the page becomes text boxes and graphics you can move, restyle and rewrite. Since LibreOffice 6.4, the Consolidate Text command joins the many small text boxes that an imported PDF produces, which makes editing paragraphs far less fiddly. Then you export back to PDF. This works well for one or two page documents such as flyers, letters and forms with a fixed layout. It is weaker on long reports, where text does not reflow across pages the way it does in a word processor. LibreOffice 26.8.2 offers Windows builds for x86-64 and ARM64, and the suite is free with no paid tier. You install the whole suite, including Writer and Calc, to use Draw.

Sejda PDF Desktop has one of the broadest tool sets here, but its free tier is a daily allowance rather than a full product. Sejda says the desktop app is free with daily limits: 3 tasks per day, documents up to 50MB and 200 pages, OCR on files up to 10 pages, images up to 5MB and combining up to 30 files and 50 pages. Inside those limits you get real editing of existing text, added text, links, images and shapes, fill and sign, a form creator, OCR, Bates numbering, headers and footers, batch removal of annotations and workflows that chain tasks. Windows users can pick a 64-bit installer or a portable build. Paid plans remove the limits, and Sejda sells a Week Pass that downgrades to free after 7 days instead of renewing. The pricing page showed euros from our location, so we have not confirmed a USD price. For a few edits a day it works well. For daily heavy use, PDFgear or PDF-XChange Editor give more without a cap.