9 Best Online PDF Editors of 2026

Sejda is the editor to open when a PDF needs a real text change rather than a sticky note. Its web editor edits existing text, adds links, images, shapes and signatures, and creates fillable form fields, all inside the browser. The free service covers documents up to 200 pages or 50 MB and 3 tasks per hour without a signup, and Sejda says files are deleted automatically after 2 hours. Around the editor sit dozens of tools, including merge, split, compress, OCR, Bates numbering, watermark and conversion to Word, Excel and images. Paid plans remove page and hourly limits, allow OCR on documents up to 100 pages, batch processing and uploads up to 500 MB per file. The Web Week Pass is a one-time payment for 7 days, Web Monthly renews each month, and Desktop+Web Annual adds Sejda Desktop for offline work. The main limit is scans: Sejda does not support changing text inside scanned documents.

iLovePDF is a large online toolbox that includes a capable editor. The Edit PDF tool adds text, shapes, comments and highlights, and iLovePDF now lets you select and edit existing text in the document. Around it sit merge, split, compress, OCR, redact, compare, sign and conversion tools, plus AI Summarizer and Translate PDF. The free Basic plan gives access to essential tools with limited processing and limited file size per task. Premium, sold for 1 to 25 users, adds unlimited processing, all tools, the desktop app for Mac and Windows and the mobile apps, digital signatures, workflows, an ad-free experience and 2,000 AI credits. Business starts at 25 users and adds SSO and a dedicated account manager. iLovePDF reports processing 16.5 million documents a day. Students and academic professionals can get a full year of Premium for free, which makes it the obvious pick on campus.

PDF24 Tools is run by geek software GmbH and covers almost every PDF job in the browser for free. The online editor lets you write on pages, insert images, shapes and signatures, add comments, black out content, rearrange pages and fill in forms in one place. Separate tools handle OCR, comparing PDFs, redaction, compression, merging, splitting, watermarks, page numbers and conversion to and from images and Office formats. PDF24 says all tools can be used free of charge and without restrictions, paid for by advertising, with no registration, no subscription and no time limits. Files travel over SSL to servers in Germany and are deleted after one hour. There is a Chrome extension, and the PDF24 Creator app gives Windows users the same tools offline. The trade-off is text editing: the editor page itself suggests converting a PDF to Word when you need to change the existing text.

Smallpdf is built in Switzerland and says it has been trusted by 1.7 billion people since 2013. Its online editor adds new text, edits existing text, highlights, draws and inserts shapes and images, and an Organize mode rearranges, merges, extracts or splits pages without leaving the document. Finished files save to Smallpdf, your device, Dropbox or Google Drive, or go out as a download link. The free plan includes 30+ tools with a daily download limit and a Sign.com account limited to 2 documents a month. Pro removes the download limit and adds Edit Text, OCR, strong compression, batch processing, unlimited AI tools such as Chat with PDF and an unlimited Sign.com Premium subscription. Team plans add centralized billing and member management. Smallpdf is ISO/IEC 27001 certified and GDPR compliant. The free tier works for quick fixes, but anyone editing every day will hit the download limit.

Xodo runs on Apryse document processing technology, and its online editor covers adding and editing text, inserting images, annotating, cropping pages, redacting sensitive information and filling or signing forms in the browser. You can edit one PDF free each day; after that, a 3-day trial unlocks the full web toolset. The Xodo Web plan costs $7.99 a month billed $95.88 annually and includes 40+ online tools with unlimited document downloads, among them OCR for scans, PDF compare, high compression, PDF/A validation and the AskPDF AI tool. Xodo says data is encrypted at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.2 or newer. Xodo PDF Studio Desktop for Windows, macOS and Linux costs $9.99 a month billed yearly or can be bought as a perpetual license, and the Document Suite at $14.99 a month bundles web, desktop and mobile. For browser-only editing, the web plan is the cheapest verified paid option here.

DocHub is built for people whose documents live in Google services. Google Drive, Gmail, Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Classroom integrations are included on every plan, so you can bring documents in from those services and export the finished copy back to Google Drive. The editor adds text, drawings, stamps and comments, and page tools merge, rotate, divide, reorder and delete pages. The free plan gives 3 uses a month of core features plus basic PDF tools, the AI Assistant and mobile apps. Basic at $8 a month adds unlimited downloads, unlimited self-signing, whiteout, highlight and unlimited templates and folders. Pro at $12 a month adds unlimited PDF editing, unlimited sign requests and envelopes, bulk send and in-person signing, and comes with a 30-day free trial. The pricing page says yearly billing saves 25%. DocHub lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and an audit trail on every plan, and the Site License adds HIPAA with a BAA.

PDFgear Online takes a different approach to privacy: the editor runs inside your browser, and PDFgear says file data is processed locally and never uploaded or transferred over the internet. You can insert text boxes and set font, size, color and alignment, add images, comments, notes, shapes, lines, stamps, signatures and freehand drawings, and use the thumbnail view to rearrange, rotate, duplicate, delete or insert pages. PDFgear says the online editor is 100% free with no sign-up, ads or premium plan, has no limit on the number of files or usage time, loads PDFs up to 100 MB and exports without a watermark. It works in supported browsers on Windows, macOS, iPhone, iPad and Android. The vendor is open about the limits: direct text editing and adding bookmarks are not supported online, and it points users to the free PDFgear desktop software for changing existing text.

Foxit PDF Editor is a desktop-class editor that also runs as a web app, which makes it the strongest option here for people who sometimes need more than a browser tool. The base PDF Editor subscription covers professional editing, conversion, OCR, form creation and document security on Windows, macOS and the web for $129.99 per user per year, with monthly billing from $10.99. PDF Editor+ at $159.99 a year adds iOS and Android apps, Foxit eSign Essentials with 150 envelopes a year and AI Smart Redact for removing personal data. Every subscription includes Foxit DMS with unlimited cloud storage, automatic updates and 300 free AI credits a month for summarizing, translating and rewriting text. A 14-day trial needs no credit card. The downside for browser-first users is cost and scope: there is no free plan, and much of what you pay for is the desktop software.

Lumin is designed around Google Drive: it says your files stay in Drive, with encryption at rest and in transit, and that Lumin does not store or move them to external servers. Lumin for Chrome and Google Workspace integrations put the editor where Drive users already work. The editor adds text boxes, shapes, images and freehand drawing, highlights text, edits the raw text of a PDF, rearranges, merges, splits and deletes pages, adds fillable fields, redacts content and searches scanned text. Lumin counts a document as completed once you share, download, print or sync it. The free plan covers 3 documents a month, Starter costs $9 a month for 10 documents, Pro costs $19 a month per team for 200 documents team-wide plus 5 agreements, and Business at $99 a month adds domain control, enforced Google sign-in and connectors for Slack and OneDrive. A library of 5,000+ free forms helps with paperwork. The document caps make it less suited to heavy editing.