Adobe Acrobat vs. Formstack Documents

Adobe Acrobat is an excellent platform for editing PDF files easily and efficiently. It supports editing unlimited files, e-signing, and allows you to easily arrange, view, and read PDFs. Its simple layout makes complex PDF editing tasks more approachable, even for non-technical users. It provides both perpetual licenses and affordable subscription plans, making it budget-friendly.

Incentivized

[Formstack Documents (formerly WebMerge) is] well suited for a mid-size organization that has multiple data inputs and needs to provide structure and professional document generation. As helpful as it is, the cost would prevent smaller businesses from realizing the cost savings that a larger one will.

Incentivized

• Ability to manipulate a PDF in various ways.
• Print production is incredibly helpful for checking off and making sure PDFs are ready for print.
• Commenting in Adobe Acrobat is awesome! So nice to be able to hand off a PDF and get it back with edits that are easy to navigate and resolve!

Incentivized

• It consumes PDF applications and prefills them from a database or form. If your file is not in PDF form it can work from applications such as Microsoft Word.
• It has logic that enables you to bundle applications based on criteria. For example you could bundle state specific applications with a new business applications if a state criteria is met.
• It has several integrations partners in the fields of E Signature and Forms.

Incentivized

• More printing settings, like being able to adjust the margins and place the print area on the page when the file size is larger than the page, and I only want to print one section. Illustrator has this feature. Often, we print from Illustrator instead, because of this limitation.

Incentivized

• If you don't know anything about these types of programs, it can be hard to learn it at first. There is a bit of a learning curve, especially when you get into the designer. It looks like MS Word, but not as expansive.
• Lingo. There have been times I've delved into the more complicated pieces and the lingo used wasn't easy to understand. This hasn't occurred much.
• I would like it to keep up with current upgrades for MS Office, but I also realize they can't be trying to match other companies while trying to maintain the innovation of their own.

Incentivized

Adobe Acrobat works seamlessly with the other Adobe products we use that are industry-standard. We will certainly continue to use Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, meaning it will always be convenient to work seamlessly with Adobe Acrobat for our organization. We are happy with the performance of Acrobat and it's meets our expectations.

Incentivized

Ease of use, nice functionality that saves time

It’s a very easy app to learn and software is essential. I feel like the app could load a bit faster but overall, is one of my go to apps. Makes reading and editing pdfs easy and I enjoy the usability of the app. It is definitely something I make sure to have downloaded on any computer I’m working from

Incentivized

We have not had availability issues with Adobe Acrobat, or at least none that I am personally aware of. Some may encounter crashes of the software during outages of electricity in their city or neighborhood, which no one can plan for, but with generators in our organization, we have been lucky not to have outages

Incentivized

One of the best features of Adobe Acrobat is its speed and stability. When dealing with massive multi-page files, having to reload a crashed program over and over again would slow down progress unnecessarily. And expanding on that, having the table of contents generated allows me to skip to different pages with ease, a necessary feature with exceptionally long files. word searches are even more helpful with text recognition.

Incentivized

For a while, Acrobat DC crashed pretty frequently. I contacted Adobe Acrobat support about the problem. At first support was unable to provide a solution. After about a month Adobe's software engineers provided a fix. I just wish it had taken less than a month to solve the problem.

Incentivized

Support was always readily available and happy to assist whenever I had a question or needed help. Great experience every time.

Incentivized

Answered basic questions.

Incentivized

I was not involved with the implementation process, so I cannot answer this question. However, when it was installed on my computer system, they did so virtually. I just sat there while they took control of my computer over the network and watch them install it, lickety split

Incentivized

DocuSign was the main alternative we looked at seriously. The E-Signature side is comparable, but DocuSign does not give you the broader PDF editing and OCR capabilities, so you would still need another tool alongside it. Acrobat made more sense as a single tool that covered document editing, OCR, and signature without stitching multiple products together

Incentivized

Formstack Documents [(formerly WebMerge)] has better overall integration with third-party integrators at a very competitive cost. That allowed us to have a broader range of choices than something like SharePoint at a better cost point than something like DocuSign. It was simple to implement, flexible, and gave us what we needed without a lot of extra fuss.

Incentivized

I find that many users aren't aware of many features of the software they use, nor may they be comfortable with learning multiple-step processes. For the simplest of PDF purposes (scanning, downloading, exporting), it gets a thumbs-up. For anything involving electronic signatures, meh--causes eyes to glaze over, or forgetting what all is involved.

Incentivized

• Adobe Acrobat is a core necessity in our creative workflow, for all the reasons mentioned. There is no other tool that fulfills all requirements. Every piece of artwork destined for print runs through Adobe Acrobat.
• Encouraging use of Adobe Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader by clients has eliminated problems of third-party tools not rendering a professional PDF correctly.

Incentivized

• Formstack was an absolute necessity for us and during our busy season, it saves our client team approx. 15 hours a week. This is MASSIVE and allows us to take on more clients.
• Formstack wasn't crazy intensive to set up timewise, but it took a team member a day to set up and a few days of testing. Once it was set, we have no reason to look back unless we want to add something on.

Incentivized