PdfCraft (v0.6.0) review: what the open-source Acrobat handles today and what it does not
PdfCraft is a free, native PDF workbench: read, organize, combine, split and secure PDFs with no account and no telemetry. Its authors put it at about 49% ready for real work against Acrobat Pro's offline feature set.
Last checked 11 Oct 2026. Independent site; not affiliated with ArtCraft or Adobe.
What works today
- Reading with light and dark themes, page organizing, combining and splitting, and security (passwords and permissions).
- Comments, forms, layers and attachments: every form field with its current value, field highlighting, and checkboxes, radio buttons, lists and signatures drawn as designed.
- Dockable Tools and Inspector panels; a portable Windows build that keeps settings next to the executable.
- Runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web. Release builds embed Japanese fonts.
What the project says is missing
From ROADMAP.md (10 Oct 2026): feature breadth ≈67% tier-weighted (423 shipped and 74 partial of 808 checklist items; 94% of the top-priority ones), ready for real work 49%, 400 to 700 agent-hours to beta. Adobe's cloud services (Document Cloud, Acrobat Sign requests, shared review, the AI Assistant) are explicitly out of scope. Check the project's docs/file-format-parity.md before relying on it for OCR or conversions.
"Ready for real work" and "feature breadth" are the project's own published estimates from each repository's ROADMAP.md (last re-measured 10 Oct 2026). They are honest, but they are self-graded. We quote them; we did not measure them.
How to install PdfCraft
Option 1: the ArtCraft Launcher (recommended by the project)
The ArtCraft Launcher (v0.2.0) installs PdfCraft and every other Craft app, picks the right build for your computer and updates them. Get it from the official apps page or the launcher's GitHub releases.
Option 2: a standalone installer
Every release on GitHub ships these files (replace 0.6.0 with the current version):
| Platform | File | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | pdfcraft-0.6.0-macos-universal.dmg | One file for Apple silicon and Intel. Signed and notarized, so Gatekeeper opens it without a warning. |
| Windows 10/11 (64-bit) | pdfcraft-0.6.0-windows-x64.msi | Installer. A -portable.zip that runs without installing is next to it. ARM64 and 32-bit builds exist too. |
| Linux | pdfcraft-0.6.0-linux-x86_64.AppImage | Also .deb, .rpm, .flatpak and a plain tarball, for x86_64 and ARM64. |
We never host installers. Download from GitHub or getartcraft.com only, and check the file against SHA256SUMS.txt in the same release if you want to be sure.
Questions
Can PdfCraft edit text in a PDF?
The README lists reading, organizing, combining, splitting, securing, comments and forms. Check the parity documents in the repository for the current state of text editing before counting on it.
Does PdfCraft do OCR?
OCR is covered in the project's file-format parity document rather than the README headline features; treat it as partial until you have tested it on your scans.
Is PdfCraft free?
Yes, open source under MIT or Apache-2.0, offline, no account, no telemetry.