Benefits
- Cross-platform solution available on desktop, mobile and web.
- Flexible pricing, including discounted bundles and one-time payments.
- Simple user interface that mainly highlights commonly used tools.
Disadvantages
- Account deletion requires contacting the customer support team.
- Some unlabeled sidebar buttons are difficult to identify due to their similar generic icons.
- Steep learning curve and not always intuitive user experience.
Our verdict
A great PDF editor for those with occasional needs, ideal for those with basic workflows and no need for advanced features.
Wondershare PDFelement is one of the best PDF editors available. It provides the essential document manipulation tools across all platforms at a reasonable price. While it may take some time to get used to its user experience, the app has a minimalistic user interface that highlights the popular features that users tend to look for.
Pricing and Availability
PDFelement offers both single-platform and multi-platform licenses. If you plan to use the PDF editor exclusively on your Mac, you can opt for a one-year, two-year, or lifetime license for $79.99 (£62), $109.99 (£84), or $103.99 (£80), respectively. The main difference between the subscription plans and the one-time payment is the app updates. By subscribing to PDFelement, you continue to receive major updates indefinitely. Meanwhile, the lifetime license may limit you to minor fixes only. Beyond that, you’re getting virtually an identical product.
Wondershare also offers PDFelement on iOS, iPadOS, Windows, Android, and web. So, if you prefer to edit documents on multiple devices, you can opt for its complete package that supports all the aforementioned platforms. At the time of writing, the 1-year, 2-year, and lifetime licenses also cost $89.99 (£70), $119.99 (£92), and $139.99 (£107).
It’s worth noting that single-platform licenses include 20GB of cloud storage, while the highlighted packs offer 100GB. Additionally, once you’ve exhausted the 20,000 AI tokens included in your purchase, you can optionally purchase 2 million more for $9.99 per month.
Find out how PDFelement compares to other PDF editors in our comparisons of the best PDF editors for Mac and the best free PDF editors.
First impressions
PDFelement offers a clean homepage with some standard PDF editing tools at the center. These include PDF conversion, optical character recognition (OCR), template selection, file compression, and more.
Meanwhile, the sidebar provides access to handy destinations like recent files, cloud documents, marked-up PDFs, and agreements you’ve sent to others for them to sign. Notably, neither the Mac app nor the website lets you delete your account if you decide to stop using the service, which could be a red flag for privacy-conscious users. Instead, you’re prompted to contact the customer support team, which unnecessarily complicates a basic action.
PDFelement Features
In terms of features, PDFelement supports most of the commonly used PDF editing features. These include text manipulation with support for various fonts, colors, and styles, in addition to inserting images and URLs. You can also add, delete, and edit pages in the document. It’s not the most advanced selection on the market, but it gets the job done in casual workflows.
PDFelement is perhaps better suited for annotation and AI needs. The app allows users to insert text, shapes, comments, stamps, forms, checkboxes, text captions, and more. And as long as you don’t run out of AI tokens, you can ask the built-in assistant, powered by ChatGPT, to summarize or translate the text. It can also insert automatic bookmarks that reflect the chapters in the document. From my observations, these annotation and AI features are more significant and complex than the text manipulation tools mentioned above.
On top of that, you can redact text, add a password to the file, convert PDF to Microsoft Office format, change page backgrounds, compress the size, and insert a watermark. It’s definitely not the most feature-rich PDF editor, but it’s aimed at casual users looking for a lightweight solution.
Despite its minimalism, PDFelement may take some getting used to. While the app has a modern interface, the unlabeled buttons in the editor sidebar can be confusing and hard to identify. I often hover over them for a second to reveal their hidden tags and differentiate their functionality. Also, some features, like text editing, can be a bit unpredictable at times. However, you eventually get used to the format.
Should I buy PDFelement?
Wondershare’s PDFelement is a great PDF editor for those with casual needs. While it can almost completely manipulate a supported document, its tools aren’t as advanced as many competing apps. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for those with basic workflows who don’t need to be exposed to power-user features. They miss out on endless menus and options that just bloat the software and aren’t relevant to their use cases.
In my experience, and given its many annotation tools, PDFelement seems to be aimed at those who review other people’s documents and send them back for revision. Using the software to leave comments on existing documents feels more natural than replacing its basic elements. Still, it’s a full-fledged PDF editor that can technically switch between the two.
If you are not sure whether PDFelement meets your needs, you can activate a one-week free trial. Once it expires, you can choose between available subscriptions and lifetime licenses if you decide to continue.
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