Adobe Acrobat - the solution?... Meh.
July 06, 2022

Adobe Acrobat - the solution?... Meh.

Rick Harris | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Acrobat DC

Adobe Acrobat DC is our firm's approved PDF software and is the only PDF editor software that our firm's tech department provides and supports, even though there are, in my opinion, much better and less expensive options available. However, because it is what is provided and supported, I use it virtually on a daily basis on my work PC to read, create, annotate, and edit PDF files.
  • opens most PDFs for reading
  • saves most documents to PDF format
  • opens PDFs created by other software packages
  • In my experience, Acrobat's suite of annotation and markup tools is seriously lacking compared to other options available.
  • In my experience, Acrobat's functionality for splitting and merging PDFs is clunky and hard to use.
  • Acrobat's ability to customize user interface and tools, and to sync customizations across multiple machines is, to my knowledge, virtually non-existent. If such capability does exist, it is well hidden and/or difficult to access and use.
  • Open/read functionality for PDF documents.
  • Annotation and markup of PDF documents.
  • Editing of PDF documents.
  • I'm not sure I am the best judge of whether this or any other software has had a positive or negative impact on our firm's overall business objectives, as I am only a single user and have not reviewed or performed any cost-benefit analysis, etc.
  • Personally, I have found Acrobat's faults, problems, inadequacies, etc. to have a negative impact on my own productivity and business objectives, as I often have to waste time trying to figure out ways to accomplish what should be straightforward tasks by workarounds and other means.
  • Occasionally I find that no amount of workaround will provide the solution to what is needed, and I am forced to copy a document to my own personal machine where I have alternative PDF editing software available to accomplish my task, and then copy the document back to my work machine.
I have not found Adobe Acrobat DC to provide anything resembling a seamless user experience across any device format--quite to the contrary, in my experience, I have instead found Adobe Acrobat DC incredibly frustrating to use in general, and especially across different devices and machines. As mentioned before, any functionality of customizing user preferences is severely limited and the ability to sync customization across devices is, to my knowledge, non-existent.
I work in the financial services industry, in a consulting capacity, with significant access to sensitive data and information. Further, my industry is one of the most heavily regulated, and I am subject to a staggering amount of compliance oversight. Thus, as you can imagine, security and compliance standards are beyond an important issue for me and my colleagues--deployment of the highest level of security for protection against data breaches and related legal issues is a bottom-line requirement. To my knowledge, Adobe Acrobat's provision along these lines does not particularly stand out as either significantly better or worse or really much different from other, similar providers; on the other hand, it is quite sufficient.
I have limited experience with Foxit PDF Editor, but use PDF Xchange Viewer and Editor extensively, and have used it for more than a decade. In my limited experience, Foxit PDF Editor was superior to Adobe Acrobat DC in virtually every way, but my familiarity with PDF Xchange made it an easy choice over Foxit. As can be deduced from this, PDF Xchange is my preferred tool for all things PDF and is, in my opinion, far superior to Adobe Acrobat in every possible way.

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

No

Are you happy with Adobe Acrobat's feature set?

No

Did Adobe Acrobat live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Adobe Acrobat go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Adobe Acrobat again?

No

PDF Xchange Viewer and Editor, Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued), Zoom, Webex Meetings, Audacity, Microsoft Teams, OneNote, Evernote, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, OBS Studio, Facebook Live, RFP360, from RFPIO, Schwab Advisor Center, LastPass for Business, DocuSign, Emburse Tallie, Skype for Business, now part of Microsoft Teams, Skype, GoTo Meeting, GoTo Webinar, Join.me, Remember the Milk, Epic MyChart, Sibelius, GarageBand
Adobe Acrobat DC is somewhat ubiquitous in the business and education world, and therefore is easily recognizable and trusted. In my opinion, despite its host of inadequacies it has managed to become the most recognized and "successful" PDF software available. The basic functionality--IE opening PDFs for reading--works well and problem free for the most part, and is so dead simple that problems are rarely encountered. It is likely already installed and ready to go, and for this most basic of operations there is no learning curve. Thus for the most basic of users who only need open & read functionality it is a somewhat reasonable choice. But for any user who needs even the slightest degree of extended functionality, I believe there are better choices available.