PdfCraft
The free alternative toAcrobat Pro
PdfCraft is an open source rewrite of Acrobat, built from scratch by the ArtCraft team. You read and search your PDFs, comment on them, reorganize pages like cards (rotate, delete, insert, move), combine, extract and split documents, fill in and create forms, protect with a password and redact sensitive details. MIT or Apache 2.0 license, free on Mac, Windows and Linux, with no account and no cloud: your PDFs never leave your machine. The catch: it is an alpha, which the team rates 55% ready for everyday work. Editing existing text is still fragile, it cannot create a PDF from Word, and its OCR does not read accented letters yet.
Versus Acrobat Pro: the match
Price
PdfCraft
€0, on every platform
Acrobat Pro
€23.99/month, one year commitment
Account and sign in
PdfCraft
No account, no cloud, your PDFs stay on your machine
Acrobat Pro
Adobe account required
Editing text
PdfCraft
Possible, but fragile on real files
Acrobat Pro
Text and images, with layout adjusted
| VS | PdfCraft | Acrobat Pro ↗ |
|---|---|---|
| Price | €0, on every platform | €23.99/month, one year commitment |
| Account and sign in | No account, no cloud, your PDFs stay on your machine | Adobe account required |
| Editing text | Possible, but fragile on real files | Text and images, with layout adjusted |
| Word, Excel, PowerPoint | No PDF created from Office; Word export loses the layout | Conversion both ways |
| Maturity | Alpha, started in late September 2026 | Over 30 years of development |
How to install it (even from zero)
The simplest path: download PdfCraft from its official page. It installs like any other app and works with no account. The prompt below has Claude pick the right file for your machine and check the download.
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Paste this prompt into Claude (Code or Desktop)
It detects your system, downloads the right version and checks it has not been tampered with:
Je veux installer PdfCraft (le logiciel open source pour lire, organiser et protéger des PDF qui reprend Acrobat, dépôt GitHub officiel storytold/pdfcraft, site getartcraft.com/apps/pdfcraft) à la place d’un abonnement Acrobat. Guide-moi pas à pas et pose-moi des questions si besoin. Repère d’abord mon système (macOS, Windows ou Linux) et mon processeur (Apple Silicon, Intel, x64 ou ARM). Télécharge ensuite la dernière version publiée dans les releases du dépôt storytold/pdfcraft, ou sur la page officielle getartcraft.com/apps/pdfcraft, en prenant le fichier qui correspond : l’image disque universelle sur Mac, l’installateur .msi sur Windows (x64, ARM64 ou 32 bits), l’AppImage, le paquet .deb, le paquet .rpm ou le Flatpak sur Linux. Vérifie l’empreinte SHA-256 du fichier avec le fichier SHA256SUMS.txt publié avec la même version, et arrête-toi si elle ne correspond pas. Installe l’appli et vérifie qu’elle démarre. Si macOS bloque l’ouverture, explique-moi comment l’autoriser dans Réglages Système, sans désactiver la sécurité de mon Mac. Rappelle-moi que PdfCraft est encore en alpha : je garde une copie de mes PDF importants avant de les modifier. Si j’utilise Claude Code, propose-moi aussi d’installer l’outil en ligne de commande pdfcraft-cli de la même version et de brancher son serveur MCP (pdfcraft-cli mcp), limité au dossier de mes PDF avec l’option --root, pour que tu puisses traiter mes documents à ma place. Pour finir, ouvre un de mes PDF, fusionne-le avec un autre, réorganise quelques pages et protège le résultat par un mot de passe, puis dis-moi ce qui marche et ce qui manque. Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.
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Work on your real PDFs
The best test: your everyday documents. Combine invoices, rotate a scan, fill in a form, protect a contract. You see right away what works and what is missing.
- 3
Keep Acrobat for conversion
It cannot create PDFs from Word, Excel or PowerPoint, Word export loses the layout, and editing text is still fragile. To read, comment, organize and protect, try PdfCraft for a week before you renew your subscription.
Paste this prompt into Claude (Code or Desktop)What you actually do with it
Your PDFs without a subscription
Read, comment, fill in, reorganize pages, combine and split: your everyday documents, without the €23.99 a month.
Your documents stay with you
No account, no telemetry, no cloud: your contracts and invoices never leave your machine, and the app works offline.
Claude handles your PDFs for you
Through its MCP server or the command line, your agent combines files, extracts pages, finds text, adds comments and fills in forms, only in the folder you open to it.
Project health, at a glance
Before installing an open-source tool, one question matters: is the project alive? These scores are computed from public GitHub data. They are not made up.
77/100
GoodHealthy, followed project: a good everyday choice.
- Activity
- 100
Is the code moving? (commits in the last 30 days)
- Maintenance
- 100
How fresh is the latest update? Fresher is better.
- Community
- 88
Stars and contributors: people around means help and fixes.
- Maturity
- 40
Project age. Old enough to be solid, still alive.
- Momentum
- 58
Current pace versus its usual pace: speeding up or dozing off?
The repo in numbers
- GitHub stars
- 18.6k
- Forks
- 7k
- Contributors
- 311
- Commits
- 3.5k
- Project age
- 0.1 yrs
- Last commit
- today
- Size
- 68.7 MB
- License
- Apache-2.0
Built with
- Rust 98.9%
Scores computed automatically from the GitHub API (last-30-days activity, update freshness, community size, project age). Refreshed daily.
Loucash’s take
6/10
After PhotoCraft and the others, the same team takes on PDFs. Read, comment, reorganize pages, combine, split, fill in a form, protect or redact a document: the essentials of Acrobat are there, with no account and no cloud, and your PDFs never leave your machine. What may bite: it is an alpha, started in late September. The team itself rates it 55% ready for everyday work: editing the text of a PDF is still fragile, it cannot create a PDF from Word, Word export loses the layout, and OCR does not read accented letters yet. To read, comment on and sort your PDFs, it is worth a try. To convert Office files or edit a contract, keep Acrobat for now.
It’s for you if: You read, comment on, sign and sort PDFs, you combine invoices or fill in forms, and you pay for Acrobat mostly for that. If you convert Word, Excel or PowerPoint files, or you often edit the text of your PDFs, keep Acrobat for now.
Also worth a look in the library
PhotoCraft
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FilmCraft
Content & social€27/moThe open source Premiere Pro, rewritten from scratch: multitrack timeline, trims, Lumetri-style grading, effects, audio mixing, captions and export. Free, with no account, still in alpha.
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VectorCraft
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