PDFelement Review, Pricing & Features

What is PDFelement?

PDFelement is a semi-robust PDF editor that has over 15 million users. It offers PDF creation and conversion, content editing, and review and annotation tools. Overall, we recommend it to those who want a PDF editor that is well-rounded and priced reasonably for those who want to long term invest in one.

Table of Contents

• What is PDFelement?
• PDFelement Review Summary
• PDFelement Pricing & Cost
• PDFelement Features
  • Creating & Converting PDFs
  • Content Editing
  • Reviewing & Annotating
  • Mobile
  • Legal & Security
• PDFelement Customer Support
• PDFelement vs. Competitors
• Is PDFelement Right For You?

PDFelement Review Summary

PDFelement was founded in 2003 by Tobee Wu. Its mission is to help its users easily create great looking documents, jot down notes, scan text, and sign and fill out forms. Today, PDFelement has over 26 employees and is based in Vancouver, Canada.

PDFelement lets you manage your PDFs across desktop, mobile and web. PDFelement offers a wide range of tools for creating and converting PDFs, editing their content, and reviewing and annotating your PDFs. Overall, PDFelement’s features are semi-robust.

When it comes to pricing, all of PDFelement’s plans are priced reasonably. For individual plans, the most expensive plan costs around $8 per month. For team plans, the most expensive plan costs around $9 per user per month. For those purchasing for education, the most expensive plan costs around $5 per student per month. Finally, the most expensive bundle package costs around $12 per month.

Overall, PDFelement is a semi-robust PDF editor. We recommend it to those who want to long-term invest in a PDF editor at a reasonable price.

PDFelement Pricing & Cost

PDFelement’s pricing depends on whether you are an individual, business, or purchasing for education, or a bundle pack. It also depends on whether you are purchasing a yearly, half-yearly, or perpetual license for PDFelement products.

However, right now you can save up to 50% if you purchase PDFelement products. PDFelement also offers a limited free version of its PDF editor.

PDFelement Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by PDFelement. We’ll discuss PDFelement’s usability, customer support, and describe the major benefits and drawbacks of the software. We’ll also show real images of the software to give you an idea of what it’s like to use the tool.

Creating & Converting PDFs

It’s crucial that you are able to create, and convert your PDFs all in one platform, especially if you handle a large number of PDFs at once. Overall, PDFelement is robust for these features. However, a major disadvantage of PDFelement is that you can only upload PDF files to create new PDFs.

PDFelement lets you create blank PDFs, scan your documents into PDFs, and merge and split your PDFs. PDFelement also lets you convert your PDFs into multiple document types including:

PDFelement also offers a free PDF template library. This includes resume, newsletter, invoice and letter templates. Uploading a template from this library is advantageous because PDFelement includes form field recognition. This allows you to automatically edit them and insert text.

Content Editing

The next step after creating your PDF is to edit its content. Overall, PDFelement’s content editing features are basic, but effective.

Text Editing

Being able to edit the text of your PDF is the backbone of a PDF editor. Overall, compared to other solutions like Adobe Acrobat and pdfFiller, text and text boxes in PDFelement are limited in terms of customizability.

PDFelement lets you adjust font, color, size, and typographical emphasis of your text. However, unlike solutions like Adobe Acrobat, you cannot include bullet or number points in your text boxes or adjust the spacing between sentences.

A disadvantage of resizing your text box in PDFelement though is that you can only readjust the sizing from the left or right side. This means the shape of your text box depends more on the size of your text.

Images

Images improve the readability of your PDF by providing visual breaks and supporting certain textual information. Overall, PDFelement’s image editing features are robust.

PDFelement lets you easily resize and move your images throughout your PDF, without it interfering with your existing content. As shown above, PDFelement also lets you resize images using numbers. This is extremely useful if you need consistent image sizes in your PDF.

PDFelement also lets you rotate, crop images, and even replace images with other images. This is useful if you want to insert a more relevant image, but do not want to deal with resizing it to fit the proportion of your PDF.

Electronic Signatures

Many PDF editors let you insert and request electronic signatures for your PDFs. Overall, PDFelement’s electronic signature feature is basic. It is best suited for those who create PDFs that only need one signer at a time.

PDFelement lets you insert standard electronic signature fields – including signature, text, checkbox, and dropdown. A major disadvantage of PDFelement’s electronic signature feature is that you cannot assign signature fields.

Page Organization

The way you organize the pages impacts how your PDF is interpreted. Overall, PDFelement offers slightly robust page organization tools.

PDFelement lets you use drag and drop to reorder your PDF pages. You can also:

Reviewing & Annotating

Reviewing and annotating are the next steps for your PDF after you’ve edited its content. PDFelement offers a wide range of review and annotation tools – including commenting, highlighting, freehand drawing, and callout boxes. However, some of these tools are inconvenient to use.

Commenting

Commenting is one of the easiest methods to use when it comes to collaborating with those in your organization. Overall, PDFelement’s commenting features are not useful.

As shown above, this is because comments in PDFelement are text boxes that cannot be replied to or even moved after they’ve been typed out. You can choose to use PDFelement’s sticky note feature as a commenting system, but these also cannot be replied to or @mention members in your organization.

Highlighting

Highlighting helps easily indicate which information in your PDF is more important. Overall, PDFelement’s highlighting feature is inconvenient to use because it can only be used to highlight text that you’ve embedded using PDFelement. If you want to highlight text that’s already within your PDF, it should be highlighted before you upload your PDF into PDFelement.

Callout Boxes

Callout boxes help make important pieces of information visually stand out, more so than highlighting. Overall, callout boxes in PDFelement are robust and dynamic.

As shown above, you can resize your callout boxes and adjust the positioning and length of their arrows. This is useful if you need to call out a small piece of text or information that is in the middle of your PDF.

Freehand Drawing Tools

PDFelement lets you freehand draw over your PDF. This feature is useful if you prefer to write down handwritten notes or markings on your PDF. Overall this feature is effective in PDFelement.

You can change the color, size, and opacity of your freehand drawing tool. A disadvantage of this tool is you cannot resize it or move it after you’ve drawn with it.

Mobile PDF Editor

PDFelement offers a mobile PDF editor for both Apple and Android. Depending on the platform, mobile PDF editors let you create, edit, review, and annotate your PDFs from anywhere. Overall, PDFelement’s mobile PDF editor is best for making simple changes or inserting small notes into your PDF.

PDFelement’s PDF editor lets you insert text, post-it notes, stamps, and your electronic signature. You can also freehand draw and search within your document. However, you cannot insert images, redact information, or insert form fields.

Legal & Security

Having proper security and data protection for your PDFs are necessary when it comes to your PDF editor. This is because if you experience a data or compliance breach, it can harshly affect you and your business’s reputation, which can be costly to remedy.

Here are some of the security features and compliances that PDFelement offers:

Customer Support

Overall, we found PDFelement’s customer support to be above average. This is because the platform offers the most diverse range of customer support channels and their live chat service is 24/7.

We found PDFelement help articles to have great readability. This is because they use a wide range of tools that improve readability. This includes bolding terms, images that highlight the feature being referenced, bullet points, and a table of contents. They also do not contain text-heavy paragraphs.

PDFelement vs. Competitors

In terms of platform advancedness, PDFelement is the most similar to PDF Expert. However, PDFelement is better for customizing your PDFs and is slightly more feature-rich. Overall, when compared to its competitors, PDFelement would be considered a mid-tier solution.

The top PDFelement competitors are:

Is It Right For You?

Overall, PDFelement is a semi-robust PDF editor. We recommend it to those who want to long-term invest in a PDF editor at a reasonable price.