Wondershare PDFelement

Description

I do not know when exactly editing a PDF became a $240 per year commitment, but I do know exactly when I refused to pay it. January 2021. I had a twenty page lease contract that required my signature on four pages, my initials on twelve others, and a corrected address on the first page. Adobe Acrobat Pro wanted $19.99 a month for the privilege of typing six characters into a text field. I could see the text. I could read the text.

I just could not change it without a subscription that would cost me more per year than the software that I use to edit actual photographs. I closed Adobe’s pricing page, typed “PDF editor not Adobe” into Google and the third result was Wondershare PDFelement. I purchased the annual license for $79.99 that same afternoon, fixed my lease in ten minutes and have been using it since. That is not a love story. It is a hostage negotiation where I took the cheaper kidnapper.

PDFelement is made by Wondershare, a Chinese software company that is based in Shenzhen and makes about forty different products — Filmora for video editing, Recoverit for data recovery, EdrawMax for diagrams, and a dozen others you have probably seen advertised on YouTube pre-rolls. Their business model is producing cheaper alternatives to the expensive industry standard software and PDFelement is their answer to Acrobat Pro. It does not try to be Acrobat. It attempts to be 85 percent of Acrobat at one-third the price and for most people, that remaining 15 percent will never make a difference.

The first thing you notice when you open PDFelement is that it looks like someone studied the ribbon interface of Microsoft Word and re-wrote it for PDFs. Tabs across the top — Home, Edit, Convert, Page, Comment, Protect, Form — with tools organized underneath. If you have used any Office application in the last fifteen years, you already know how to go about PDFelement. This is not innovative design. It is borrowed design. But borrowed design that works is still design that works, and after wrestling with Acrobat’s ever-increasingly cluttered interface — where Adobe keeps hiding features behind panels and sidebars and dropdowns that seem to change location with every update — PDFelement’s simple ribbon was a relief.

Text editing is the main reason anyone buys a PDF editor, and PDFelement does it well enough to be useful and badly enough to make you swear every once in a while. When you click on the Edit button and then click on a text block, it is made editable. You can change words, correct typos, change font size, and reformat paragraphs. The software does a reasonable job of detecting the original font — it got Times New Roman and Arial right in every document I tested, and even got Calibri right most of the time.

Where it struggles is with less common fonts, and with documents that were created by scanning paper. If the original pdf was created from Word or InDesign or any application that embeds information about the fonts, editing is smooth. If the PDF came from a scanner or was exported from some obscure government system using a font that has not been updated since 2003, PDFelement will substitute something close and the result will look subtly wrong — like a word that is wearing someone else’s clothes.

OCR is available in the paid version, and it’s what took me from “this is fine” to “this is actually useful.” I work with scanned contracts regularly — old contracts from the early 2010s that only exist as photographed pages in PDF form. Before PDFelement, to search these documents meant scrolling through sixty pages of documents looking for a certain clause with my eyes. Now I run OCR and the text is searchable and editable and Ctrl+F does in three seconds what used to take me twenty minutes.

The accuracy is good but not perfect. Clean scans using standard fonts convert at maybe 95 percent accuracy. Faded documents, notes that were handwritten in margins or pages that were scanned at an angle will give you gibberish in the exact places you need them to be correct. I learned to always proofread OCR output after a converted contract changed “30 days” to “80 days” because the three was slightly smudged. That would have been a fun conversation to have with a client.

The conversion engine is where PDFelement earns most of its keep in my workflow. PDF to Word, PDF to Excel, PDF to PowerPoint, PDF to image, and vice versa — they all work and most of them work better than I expected. The formatting of the PDF document is maintained with surprising fidelity when converting to Word. Tables stay as tables. Headers maintain their size. Bullet points do not explode into random characters.

It is not perfect — complex layouts with multiple columns and embedded images occasionally shift around, and text boxes occasionally overlap after conversion — but compared to the free online converters that turn a two-column report into a single column of chaos, PDFelement generates output that requires a little cleanup rather than a complete rebuild. I converted a 45 page technical manual from PDF to Word last year and only had to fix alignment on six pages. That saved me at least 3 hours of manual reformatting.

Form creation and filling is another area PDFelement does a genuinely good job in. It automatically detects form fields in existing PDFs — checkboxes, text fields, dropdown menus — and makes them interactive. You can also build forms from scratch using drag-and-drop placement of fields. I developed an intake form for a small consulting project with PDFelement’s form tools and the process took about thirty minutes.

The same form in Acrobat would have taken the same time, maybe less but Acrobat would have charged me 3X more for the year. The auto-detection of the form is not perfect. It occasionally misses checkboxes that are too small or mistaking a table cell for a text field, but manual correction is quick and the detection catches maybe 80 percent of fields correctly on the first pass.

The AI features came in 2023 and they are just what you’d expect from a company that wants “AI” on the feature list. There is an AI assistant that can summarize documents, answer questions about the content, rewrite text, and translate between languages. It works via a chat interface in the sidebar. I tried it out on a 30 page financial report and asked it to summarize the key findings.

The summary was not bad — it hit most of the main points, missed some of the nuances, and wrote everything in that unmistakable AI cadence where every paragraph sounds like it was written by a very polite undergraduate. It is a convenience feature. It is no substitute for reading the document yourself, and I would never trust it with anything where accuracy is more important than speed. The translation feature is more useful — I ran a French contract through it and the output was good enough to understand the general terms, though I still had a human translator look at the final version before I signed it.

Now for the things which bother me.

The pricing structure is intentionally confusing. There is a quarterly plan, annual plan and a perpetual license — but the perpetual license is for a certain version, not for lifetime updates. So you pay $129.99 for PDFelement 10 Perpetual and when PDFelement 11 comes out you either pay for the upgrade or you stay on the old version.

The annual plan at $79.99/year has updates for as long as you pay. The quarterly plan exists at $29.99 per quarter, which is $120 per year — more expensive than the annual plan for no additional benefit, seemingly designed to catch people who do not do the math.

Wondershare also runs constant “sales” where the prices are slashed by 40 or 50 percent, but since the sale has been running every time I have visited their website for four years, I am fairly confident the “sale” price is just the real price with a fake original price crossed out above it. This is not unique to Wondershare. Half the software industry does this. It still annoys me.

The upselling within the application is visible. After performing certain actions — OCR, batch conversion, AI features — PDFelement will occasionally recommend upgrading to a higher tier or purchasing additional Wondershare products. These are not as aggressive as what AVG or Norton do, but they are there, and they destroy the illusion that you have paid for a complete product. You bought PDFelement. You should not need to be reminded that Wondershare is also a company that sells a video editor when you are signing a contract.

Performance is generally fine for normal documents but is poor with large files. A 200 page PDF with embedded images opens in about four seconds on my machine — an i7-12700H with 32GB of RAM — which is ok. A 500 page scanned document takes noticeably longer, and scrolling through it is sluggish compared to how the same file works in Acrobat or even in the free SumatraPDF viewer. OCR on large files is slow.

Running recognition on a 100 page scanned document took more than twelve minutes. Acrobat does the same job in roughly half the time. For occasional use this does not matter. If you are batch processing hundreds of scanned documents every day, the difference in speed adds up.

The Mac version exists but has historically been behind the Windows version in features and stability. A colleague who uses PDFelement on her MacBook Pro reported on crashes when editing large files and said the interface felt less responsive than the Windows version. Wondershare has improved Mac parity over the past two years but if you are choosing between PDFelement for Mac and something like PDF Expert by Readdle – which was built specifically for Apple’s ecosystem – PDF Expert is probably the better Mac experience. On Windows, however, PDFelement’s primary competitor is Acrobat, and in that arena, the value proposition is obvious.

I am now in the fifth year of using PDFelement. I have edited hundreds of documents using it. Converted dozens. OCR’d stacks of scanned files. Built forms, added watermarks, redacted sensitive information, merged contracts, split reports into individual chapters, batch-compressed folders full of bloated PDFs into files small enough to email. It has done everything I have asked it to do. Not always elegantly. Not always quickly. But always for less than half what Adobe charges for the same capabilities.

PDFelement is not the best PDF editor. Acrobat Pro is still the best PDF editor — it has thirty years of development, better OCR, faster performance, deeper integration with Creative Cloud, and a polish that Wondershare has not matched. But “best” and “worth the price” are two different questions, and for someone who edits PDFs regularly but not professionally, who needs the tools but not the prestige, PDFelement answers the second question better than Acrobat answers the first. It is the Honda Civic of PDF editors. Nobody brags about owning one, but it starts every morning and gets you where you need to go.