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Performance issues that will haunt you to the end of days
June 17, 2022

Performance issues that will haunt you to the end of days

Chris Cardinal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Acrobat DC

I use Adobe Acrobat DC the way most organizations use it: to create and manage PDFs and to collect and manage signatures. As the creator of the PDF format, Adobe's first-party PDF tool is still always going to have the best compatibility, and the integration to Adobe Sign and Document Cloud is intended to be helpful, and are to a point.
  • Viewing and managing PDFs
  • Building fillable PDF forms
  • Editing PDFs
  • Signing PDFs
  • Performance: Acrobat is frequently very slow even on very powerful PCs
  • Buggy: Request for signatures works on one computer for me, but completely does not work on another
  • Frustrating UI: there are certain UI/UX decisions that are mind-numbing in how frustrating they are
  • Crashes: Acrobat will crash, even on a system with 64 GB of RAM, doing what feels like rudimentary tasks
  • Irritating workflows: Acrobat prompts about content reading and other things that require disabling them to use the software the way you expect
  • Form building is frustrating at times and not as simple as it should be
  • PDF management
  • Adobe Sign integration/request signatures
  • Form building
  • Adobe Sign is included in our CC membership, but they nickel and dime for any programmatic options, which is frustrating
  • Acrobat has definitely crashed on me, costing me time and energy
While it's difficult to balance a product with so many features with any sort of usability, from my experience, Adobe still manages to hide useful functionality, break certain functionality, and bring the application to a crawl when doing something simple like editing a PDF. While the PDF generated works well and does meet its intended purpose, the performance issues on the desktop are frustrating.
This is par for the course and a standard expectation with any professional software. Nothing about the tool or platform strikes me as particularly modern in this regard but is the bog-standard for ensuring data safety and compliance. No points are awarded for doing the basics.

Do you think Adobe Acrobat delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Adobe Acrobat's feature set?

Yes

Did Adobe Acrobat live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Adobe Acrobat go as expected?

No

Would you buy Adobe Acrobat again?

Yes

When it works, the request for signatures functionality is really nice. But it doesn't work on one of my computers. It works on my other computer. I have tried uninstalling, deep cleaning, changing from 32-bit to 64-bit and back again, and that functionality simply breaks, even though it highlights it and shows that it's an option. It's fine for reorganizing pages and managing PDFs, but it can crater in performance in ways that are mind-numbing for having a very powerful PC.