Smallpdf Review, Pricing & Features

What is Smallpdf?

Smallpdf is a basic PDF editor with over 500 million users. It offers tools for creating and converting PDFs, editing the content within your PDFs, and reviewing and annotating PDFs. Overall, we recommend it for those with a smaller budget and prefer a beginner PDF editor platform.

Table of Contents

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

Smallpdf Review Summary

Smallpdf was founded in 2003 by Mathis Buchi, Manuel Stofer, and Lino Teuterberg. Smallpdf’s mission is to create a product that is reliable, secure, and simple to use. Today, Smallpdf has over 70 employees and is based in Zürich, Switzerland.

Smallpdf is a basic PDF editor that helps its users edit and manage their PDFs. It offers tools for PDF creation and conversion, content editing, and reviewing and annotating. Overall, Smallpdf is a basic PDF editor with easy to use features.

In terms of pricing, Smallpdf is one of the more affordable solutions available. It offers a free version of its PDF editor and its most expensive individual plan costs $12 per month. We recommend Smallpdf to those with a smaller budget and only need a more basic PDF editor.

Overall, Smallpdf is a basic and easy-to-use PDF editor. It’s best suited for those with a smaller budget and prefer a beginner PDF editor solution.

Smallpdf Pricing & Cost

Smallpdf’s pricing ranges from free to $10 per month. You can also save up to ~30% if you purchase an annual plan. Smallpdf also offers a 7-day free trial for each paid plan.

Smallpdf Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by Smallpdf. We’ll discuss Smallpdf’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

The ability to create and convert your PDFs all within one application is criticall if you are managing a large number of PDFs at once. Overall, when compared to other solutions, Smallpdf is more limited when it comes to PDF creation and conversion tools.

Smallpdf lets you upload a variety of document types to create PDFs – including Word documents, Excel sheets, PowerPoints, JPEGs, and PNGs. Smallpdf also lets you split and merge multiple PDFs into one PDF. A disadvantage of Smallpdf is that you cannot scan documents into PDFs.

Smallpdf lets you convert your PDFs into multiple document types including:

Content Editing

Once you’ve created your PDF, you need to be able to edit its content, especially within the same solution. Overall, Smallpdf is very easy to use for content editing, but does not include the ability to add and edit headers and footers.

Text Editing

Text is one of the most important aspects of a PDF. Therefore, it’s imperative that your PDF editor accommodates your text needs. Overall, Smallpdf’s text editing features are basic.

Smallpdf lets you adjust the font, color, and size of your text, however, these options are limited. Some disadvantages of Smallpdf’s text editing features is you cannot use numbers to resize your font and you cannot rotate your text box.

Images

Images improve a PDF’s readability and provide visual breaks between large amounts of text. Overall, Smallpdf’s image editing features are some of the more basic – you can only insert an image and resize it. You cannot perform actions like rotating your image.

Electronic Signatures

Some PDF editors let you insert your own electronic signatures and request signatures from others. Smallpdf’s electronic signature features are less robust when compared to other solutions like Adobe Acrobat and pdfFiller.

Smallpdf lets you insert a small range of fields into your PDF – including signature, date, and checkbox fields. Smallpdf also lets you see which PDFs need your signature, which you've sent out for signature, which you've signed, and which have expired/ been cancelled.

Reviewing & Annotating

Once you’ve finished editing your PDFs, the next step would be to have others review and annotate them. Overall, these features are intuitive – however, a major disadvantage of Smallpdf is that it does not offer commenting as an annotation feature.

Highlighting

Highlighting is an easy way to indicate important information. Smallpdf offers an automatic and a freehand highlighting tool. Overall, while Smallpdf’s freehand highlighting tool is standard, Smallpdf’s automatic highlighting tool is very convenient to use.

As shown above, you can use Smallpdf’s highlighting tool to automatically highlight text that you’ve inserted into your PDF. An advantage of this tool is that it can detect and auto-highlight text that is already within your uploaded PDF.

Freehand Drawing Tools

Smallpdf offers a drawing tool that lets you freehand any notes or markings you want to add to your PDFs. This feature is very useful if you prefer to handwrite your notes or like to mark your PDFs by hand. Overall though, this feature is standard in Smallpdf because you are limited in the number of colors and weights you can adjust your drawing tool to.

Smallpdf Integrations

Smallpdf offers integrations that let you expand the functionality of your PDF editor. Most of the time this involves being able to access your PDFs from another centralized location.

Compared to other solutions, Smallpdf offers a lower number of integrations. These include Google Drive and Dropbox.

Mobile PDF Editor

Smallpdf offers a mobile PDF editor for both Apple and Android. With a mobile PDF editor, you can create, edit, review, and annotate your PDFs anywhere.

Smallpdf lets you perform almost every function you can perform on its web application in its mobile app. This includes converting and compressing PDFs, adding text, highlighting, and free hand drawing. However, you cannot add images, split PDFs, or include shapes when you edit PDFs in Smallpdf’s mobile app.

Legal & Security

Having proper security and data protection for your PDFs is critical for your PDF editor. Data breaches can not only harshly affect you and your company’s reputation, but can also be costly to rectify.

Unfortunately, Smallpdf lacks many of the key security features needed to make sure your data is secured and protected. If data protection is crucial for your PDFs, we recommend using another solution like Adobe Acrobat.

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

Customer Support

We found Smallpdf’s customer support to be slightly above average. While the platform only offers two customer support channels, they are accessible 24/7.

Overall, Smallpdf help articles have good readability. They list step-by-step processes clearly, include gifs that demonstrate how to perform certain actions with Smallpdf, and use bolded headers to separate sections of information. However, oftentimes we found large paragraphs within the help articles, making them slightly more inconvenient to read.

Smallpdf vs. Competitors

In terms of platform advancedness, Smallpdf is one of the easiest to use. Compared to its competitors, Smallpdf is the most beginner-friendly solution, but also less feature-rich.

The top Smallpdf competitors are:

Is It Right For You?

Overall, Smallpdf is a basic and easy-to-use PDF editor. It’s best suited for those with a smaller budget and prefer a beginner PDF editor solution.