Best Free Non-Adobe PDF Reader

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Last updated by Jojo Yee on 12. May 2017 - 07:21

Introduction

This category includes desktop programs that can be used for reading and annotating PDF documents, other than the slow and bloated Adobe Reader. While I will admit that the Adobe product has improved in both speed and features in recent years, it still lags behind some of the products reviewed here.

My personal criteria for rating the PDF reader include the following factors:

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Rated Products

PDF-XChange Editor

It serves as a PDF viewer plus basic editing requirements

Our Rating:
5
License: Free (Limited features)
Loads reasonably fast; can print PDFs; extensive annotation; allows filling and saving of Adobe PDF forms; can extract text and images, magnify text, manage document properties and security; Can OCR image based PDF documents.
Some advanced features are included but not free. When such features are used, resulting PDFs will be watermarked.
Read full review...

Foxit Reader

A worthy contender to open and accurately render pdf files

Our Rating:
4
License: Free
Fast, modern user interface, can fill and save both forms and form data, provides extensive annotation and review features. Social media interface. Can insert and validate electronic signatures.
No OCR capability. Users need to take great care during the install process to avoid a variety of unwanted components and system changes, the make-up of which is changed regularly. User manual must be downloaded separately.
Read full review...

Sumatra PDF

A simple and light pdf reader

Our Rating:
3
License: Free (Open source)
Small, fast, source code available.
Few features - it's basically just a viewer, image quality is not the best.
Read full review...

More PDF Readers

Check out more PDF readers reviewed and rated with Software Finder at our site.

Related Products and Links

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Comments

It has been replaced with PDF-XChange Editor. Now updated in the review.

Here I like to read news about features, and I want to add some about PDF-XChange Editor as my favourite and the most useful software. Now It has great Bookmark and GoogleDrive plug-ins. Also, it can convert PDF to MS PowerPoint format, open and work with Portfolio, and it can work with documents in SharePoint.

Now PDF-XChange Editor can convert each existing PDF to PDF/A-1, PDF/A-2, or PDF/A-3 format. It's great feature if you need to preserve your digital documents for the future.

PDF Xchange Viewer has a native 64 bit version. so the line "32 bit but 64 bit compatible" is not correct.

I am personally using the 64 bit version on my laptop since the last few years.

Thanks mehman for pointing out. This has now been corrected.

I also like PDF X-change mostly but I need pdf signing with digital certificate (and that's pro only).

According to their website, Foxit Reader appears to allow only verifying, and not adding a digital signature based on public key certificate.
For one of their commercial products, the description includes:
Add/verify digital signatures: Allows the PDF document receiver to validate the status of a digital signature to determine if the document has been modified since the signature was applied.
But for Foxit Reader it's only: Verify digital signatures: Allows the PDF document receiver to validate the status of a digital signature to determine if the document has been modified since the signature was applied.
So does Foxit Reader really allow digital signing? Does this require a Docusign account? If yes, how does this work and why is this required?

If Foxit Reader can't sign PDF - would there be an alternative free software able to do this?
I'd like to skip the hassle of installing foxit reader only to see it doesn't offer pdf signing.

What about Sumatra? Does it allow pdf sigining using an existing digital certificate?
Thank you.

I ditched Foxit Reader off all my computers here. Their darn software update shoves their Foxit Cloud service on the computers here. I uninstalled it and it shows up after each update to their PDF reader. There is no way of bypassing the installation of FoxIt Cloud either.

Snowbound, if you still like Foxit, I suggest you try the portable version from portable apps. I haven't seen anything about a cloud service in it. I just googled Foxit cloud service and saw a link that saids that you sign up for it. Anyway, the Foxit portable version works great. Nothing gets bundled.

Bo

I opened the same PDF art book in Foxit, PDF-XChange Viewer, and Sumatra PDF. All are the portable editions and the latest version. Stats were as follows:

Memory
Foxit Reader 32,860 KB
PDF-XChange 19,436 KB
Sumatra 6,276 KB

Hard Drive Space
Foxit Reader 133.0 MB
PDF-XChange 20.0 MB
Sumatra 6.17 MB

I plan on deleting Foxit shortly. Its interface is more appealing, but it has become bloated in recent years and doesn't do anything out of the ordinary to justify the much larger footprint. PDF-XChange is my default reader and I use Sumatra for epub, mobi, and the occasional comic book download.

Posted on behalf of member: sicknero. With Sumatra (portable) I get between 24 and 45 meg with a PDF open. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...-30_133128.jpg With Sumatra idle I get about 12 meg but it can drop to less than a meg if I run System Explorer's "Process Memory Usage Cleanup". Not normally something I'd bother with, I just tried it out of interest. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...-30_133421.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...-30_134340.jpg I haven't tested PDF XChange and it's years since I last used Foxit.
That is very interesting. :) As I've only used PDF-XChange, I'm interested to get any insights you have that explain why the differences are so large? I expect that most of the differences are due to each application's feature-set (memory) and the support for PDF features (memory and disk). But the Foxit file size is still a magnitude different. Also, this 2013 dotTech review, Windows Best free PDF reader — Adobe Reader vs Foxit Reader vs PDF-XChange Viewer vs Nitro PDF Reader vs Sumatra PDF compares the same products but comes up with different memory usage - maybe they misplaced a decimal point when recording the Sumatra memory usage. What do you think?
Thank you for sharing your experiences Baroque and Blue which I'm sure will benefit others interested in this software category. MC - Site Manager.

Foxit apparently installed a McAfee Security Scan tool onto my PC without asking for permission, as it popped up asking to update a short while after I downloaded Foxit and I hadn't made any other changes to my PC. It was easy enough to uninstall, but still, makes me wonder what else they are willing to do.

Because you compare old PDF-Viewer and new Foxit, yes? If you try Pdf-XChange Editor,you can see that the quality is much better in favour of Editor.

When comparing different PDF viewers it is very important to compare the visibility (quality) of the PDF on the screen, not only the functions and speed. This is NOT being done in the review, nor in the comments.

I compared both Foxit Reader and PDF X-change Viewer and they are quite different. I compared text, as text shows best how the rendering qualities of the products are::
- at 800% the text in both viewers is presented on the screen at about the same quality.
- at about 100% there is a visible better representation of Foxit over PDF X-change - in PDF Foxit the text is much sharper as in PDF X-change!

As reading text is the hard part for our eyes I would happily recommend Foxit over PDF X-change!

I just wanted to mention SlimPDF which I discovered yesterday. It's the fastest and lightest reader I've yet seen and has only the most minimal controls and options. Just read/print, nothing else. I was previously using Sumatra as a quick viewer but I've found that it isn't great at printing, while SlimPDF manages perfectly.

I wanted an alternative to the built-in Firefox viewer (I've had frequent problems with that) without having to use a full-featured program as the default viewer, and Slim seems to fit the bill very well.

The download is an installer (no bundling that I could discover) but I just extracted that and ran it portably with no problems.

http://www.investintech.com/resources/freetools/slimpdfreader/

Hi sicknero,

Thanks for this. I'd like to give it a try. Can you provide some more details? Which program did you extract it with? Was it Universal Extractor? Did you have to delete any files or folders after extracting? Did you have to create any files, e.g. an ini file?

Hi Joe. Actually after some more testing, SlimPDF does have problems ... for instance I have a collection of classic literature scanned to pdf and Slim really struggles to load these and then fails to display them properly. However, the purpose I originally wanted it for (printing large, text-only pdfs from the internet at work) it seems to do very well so I'll probably keep it for that. I did do a proper install to see if that would fix the problems it was having but it makes no difference.

Anyway if you want to try it, yes you can just put it through Universal Extractor which will give you three folders - {app}, {cf32}, embedded, and a file named install_script.iss. I just copied all the files from {app} into another folder on the drive where I keep all my portables. {cf32} contains a file called itech.dll ... no idea what that's for but the prog seems to work fine without it.

As far as I can tell it makes no changes in appdata but it does create a registry key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Investintech.com Inc.)which holds recently opened file paths and a subkey for settings, although it's written nothing in that so far.

Thanks for the info. I extracted it with UE too but when testing it failed to display certain text in my test file. Actually, I don't even know how to describe what the problem areas looked like. It was probably some other font, but certainly not text at all.

Thanks for the feedback anyway. ;-)

It's a curious one for sure :-)

Some files I've tried are several hundred pages of image-heavy scanned books and are displayed perfectly, while others it fails completely with. One book for instance, looks as if the ink was wet and someone's smeared it liberally about with a damp cloth.

In PDF XChange - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/kkushi2ae54e1a1/2014-06-29_00-22-21.png

In SlimPDF - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/tx7ccngz1lybjzk/2014-06-29_00-23-29.png

Very odd :-) Something to do with different types of pdf file perhaps, I don't know anything about that though.

It's really strange. Nevertheless, I'm wasting any more time with it.

@mr6n8:
I finally went to the actual reader site, and from what I have read, it appears that it will do what I need.

And, also appears to NOT install crap or try to install crap like Foxit does, nor does it screw up the PDF output with a bloody watermark like PDF-Xchange does. WHO's IDIOTIC idea was that anyway? I can see "limited functionality", but to actually mess up a created PDF with that? THAT is not the way to win me over that's for sure. Features or not appearance or not, Foxit and PDF-Xchange BOTH have SERIOUS black marks against them. But so far the only "complaint" I have seen about Nitro is about the look of the ribbon bar? Come on.

I expected PDF-XChange Viewer to be at the top of your list when I started the search for PDF readers, and to no surprise, I see it is!! It is the best one I have ever used, and amazingly, it is free!

I also use the "Typewriter" mode to fill forms, annotate documents, etc. The combination of PDF-XChange Viewer and CutePDF has made my life so, so much, easier!

I updated PDF xchange viewer to ver 2.5 last June, and the comment tools are not working now. How can I get these working again?

I don't understand why the comment tools don't work for you. They work fine for me in the latest portable version. Have you tried uninstalling and re-installing?

Thank you. I must have subconsciously avoided the obvious. Now I have the new version 3 working with the edit tools.

Google Chrome also has an excellent built-in pdf viewer nowadays, which I find very easy to use. It's really quick: almost instantly loads a 70MB (local) file. It has basic functionality (it lacks access to a table of contents as far as I know), but in 9 out of 10 times all I need is this basic functionality. Since Chrome is installed by default on many systems (well, okay, so is Adobe Reader :D ), no extra software is needed.

This is a category which reviews stand alone pdf readers. Don't think the inbuilt reader in Chrome falls in that category.

I too have gone back to Adobe Reader and use PDFCreator to create the PDF. Currently dont use editing of PDF's.

But I found Foxit annoying in that it installs that cloud connection, PDF X-Change really sucks in that YES the "free" version actually put a WATERMARK on EVERY document you create with it.

And Sumatra was not quite as good at display of PDF and yes I agree start screen is ugly.

So, I have gone back. I really wish there was a truly good and truly free, as well as free of wanting to load a bunch of crap onto your system program that does the following:
1. open/read PDF's
2. create PDF's via a virtual printer (and NO GHOSTSCRIPT CRAP).
3. allowed decent annotations of PDF's when needed

Unfortunately there is none of that type of program available.

The Foxit Cloud thing can be uninstalled separately, it has its own uninstaller that you can run from, for example, Programs and Features in W7.

Sumatra is my favourite for pretty much any document that it supports. Yes it's a little unattractive but you can edit settings.txt to change some of the colours and for speed of loading it's unbeatable in my experience. It's also very handy for looking at ebooks without needing to import them first into some ebook reader's library which is how most of them (Calibre for instance) work.

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