Best PDF Tools for macOS Sonoma in 2026

Preview is genuinely capable and underappreciated. Mac users often pay for PDF tools that Preview already handles for free. **What Preview does well**: - View and navigate any PDF - Annotate with highlights, notes, shapes, and drawings - Fill and sign PDF forms - Merge PDFs (drag pages from sidebar of one to sidebar of another, or use File > Export as PDF) - Split PDFs (delete unwanted pages, then export) - Rotate individual pages - Compress PDFs (File > Export as PDF > Quartz Filter > Reduce File Size) - Add basic password protection - Basic image editing and format conversion **Preview's limitations**: - Compression quality is mediocre — the 'Reduce File Size' Quartz filter often produces low-quality output - No OCR capability - No advanced editing (changing text within a PDF) - No form creation - Basic batch operations only For everyday tasks, Preview is often all you need on macOS.

Preview covers most casual needs but falls short in specific scenarios. Here are the situations that require additional tools:

1. 1For better compression quality, use LazyPDF in Safari/Chrome instead of Preview's Reduce File Size — Ghostscript compression is significantly better than the Quartz filter
2. 2For merging many PDFs quickly, use LazyPDF's Merge tool — it's faster than Preview's sidebar drag-and-drop for more than 5 files
3. 3For OCR on scanned documents, use LazyPDF's OCR tool — Preview has no OCR capability
4. 4For converting PDFs to Word or Excel format, use LazyPDF's PDF to Word / PDF to Excel tools — Preview can't do this
5. 5For advanced editing (changing text in a PDF, creating forms), consider PDF Expert or Adobe Acrobat Pro

**PDF Expert by Readdle** ($79.99/year): The most popular paid PDF app for macOS. Extremely polished interface, fast performance on Apple Silicon, excellent Apple Pencil support on iPad (with continuity), and strong editing features. Best for users who work with PDFs daily and want the best Mac-native experience. The editing, annotation, and form-filling features are notably better than Preview. **Adobe Acrobat Pro** ($19.99/month): The industry standard with full feature set. On macOS, integrates with Microsoft Office and Apple's ecosystem. Best for users who need enterprise features, e-signatures with audit trails, advanced form creation, or PDF/A compliance. Universal binary for both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. **Nitro PDF Pro** ($179/year): Strong competitor to Acrobat. Good value for users who want a one-time purchase option. Apple Silicon native in the latest version. **ABBYY FineReader PDF** ($99/year): Best OCR for macOS. If you scan documents regularly, this is the top tool for making scanned PDFs searchable with high accuracy. **Hazel + PDF tools**: For automation-minded Mac users, Hazel (file automation tool) can be set up to automatically compress, rename, or move PDF files when they arrive in specific folders. Combined with Ghostscript (installable via Homebrew), this creates powerful automatic PDF workflows. **Permute** / **Markdown to PDF tools**: For specific conversion needs, the Mac ecosystem has many specialized tools in the Mac App Store.

Browser-based tools work just as well on macOS as on Windows. LazyPDF, ILovePDF, and Smallpdf all work in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on macOS Sonoma. A key macOS advantage: Safari on macOS handles file downloads and uploads smoothly, and the Files picker integrates well with iCloud Drive. If your PDFs are stored in iCloud Drive (very common for Mac users), browser tools can access them directly. For compression specifically, LazyPDF is notably better than Preview's built-in Reduce File Size option. A document that Preview compresses to 8MB might compress to 2MB with LazyPDF's Ghostscript engine, while looking identical on screen. The complementary approach many Mac users find effective: - **Preview**: Day-to-day viewing, annotations, simple merges - **LazyPDF**: Better compression, OCR, conversions, heavy merges - **PDF Expert**: Complex editing, form filling, Apple Silicon optimized speed

macOS Sonoma users on Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4 Macs) benefit from significantly faster PDF processing in native apps: **Apple Silicon native apps**: PDF Expert, Adobe Acrobat Pro (Universal), and ABBYY FineReader are all Apple Silicon native in their current versions. Processing large PDFs is faster on M-series Macs than on comparable Intel Macs. **Browser-based tools**: Processing happens on the server for most operations, so there's no local CPU impact. LazyPDF performance is identical on any Mac because the heavy processing is server-side (for operations like compression and OCR) or runs efficiently in WebAssembly (for client-side operations like merge and split). **Ghostscript on Apple Silicon**: If you use Homebrew to install Ghostscript for command-line compression, install the arm64 version for maximum performance on M-series Macs: `brew install ghostscript` The performance difference is most noticeable for OCR on large scanned documents and batch operations on many files. For typical single-file operations, all modern Macs handle PDFs effortlessly.