Better PDF for Mac · Free
Read without glare, fill any form, scan from your iPhone and sign with a certificate, smart card or USB token. Free. Pro adds editing, redaction and PDF to Word for a single small payment.
Modes
Press the key, the chrome changes, nothing else moves.
Light, dark, night and e‑ink. Tabs, bookmarks, search that finds every match.
Highlight, underline, strikeout, notes and freehand draw. A palette under the selection.
Change text and images in place. Fonts matched and embedded on save.
Real fields fill themselves. On a flat scan, click and type. Draw, type or use a certificate.
Reorder, rotate, split and merge from one grid.
Your iPhone as the camera, or dropped photos. Squared, cleaned, recognised, stitched.
01 · Sign · Free
Drag a box where the signature goes, then draw or type your name, or sign with a keychain certificate, smart card or USB token. Better PDF writes a PAdES signature, with an optional RFC 3161 timestamp.
02 · Read · Free
Four appearances: light, dark, night, and an e‑ink mode built for Boox, Dasung and Kindle Scribe screens. Pure black on white, no shadows, no animation, whole-page turns.
See it on an e‑ink screen ↓
03 · Fill & Sign · Free
Real form fields fill themselves. For a flat scan, click where the answer goes and type. Nothing is drawn over the printed text.
Checkboxes and dates on flat scans: coming.
04 · Edit Pro
Click into any paragraph and type; the font, size and line stay as they were. Move blocks, replace images, add a font file. Saving embeds every font as a subset.
Redaction and password protection are Pro too. Versions: coming.
05 · Scan · Free
Point your iPhone at the page through Continuity Camera, or drop in photos. Better PDF finds the edges, squares the perspective, cleans the shadows, recognises the text and stitches every page into one searchable PDF. Colour and greyscale are free; black and white, whiteboard, receipt and scans over 20 pages come with Pro.
iPhone and iPad · Free
Lens makes the iPhone the scanner: it finds the edges, squares the page, cleans the shadows and recognises the text on the device. Read, annotate, fill and sign the same files, and export them to Word, images, text, Markdown or CSV. Everything in the first version is free, with nothing to buy: every Lens filter, every export size and OCR, for scans up to 100 pages.
A later version adds iOS Pro ($4.99) for new on-device features: Ask this PDF, Cards from scans and iCloud sync. Mac Pro includes it, in either edition. One purchase. Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Coming to the App Store, free · iOS 26 or later
E-ink
Pure black on white, with no shadows and no motion. Pages turn whole with ← → and Page Up/Down. Greys are quantised in four levels so halftones never shimmer, highlights show as a grey band, and the glyphs come from their own ink pack.
E-ink reading (⌥⌘E) keeps your theme and only changes the page. Remembered per display.
Built for Boox, Dasung and Kindle Scribe style monitors.
OCR
Open a scan and Better PDF offers to recognise it. Apple Vision runs on your Mac; nothing is uploaded. Text becomes selectable, copyable and searchable with ⌘F in seconds, and the original file is never modified. Save a Digital Copy writes a new PDF with an invisible text layer so other apps and Spotlight see real text.
Tools · ⇧⌘T
Window › Tools puts every conversion in one place, and File › Export As (⇧⌘E) offers the same formats from any open PDF. A live preview shows the result before you save: headings stay headings, tables stay tables. Every tool runs on your Mac; nothing is uploaded.
Next: PDF to PowerPoint, and Word, PowerPoint and Excel to PDF.
Signature styles Pro
Six built-in styles, or your own: stacked logos with opacity and anchor, editable text lines, font and weight per line, and every date format with its time zone. One default per certificate.
Styles are Pro; signing itself stays free.
Why people switch
Six things a PDF app has to get right. All of them run on your Mac, with no account and no upload.
Keychain certificates, smart cards and USB tokens write a PAdES signature, with an optional RFC 3161 timestamp.
On a flat scan, click where the answer goes and type. Nothing is drawn over the printed text.
Continuity Camera or dropped photos. Edges found, page squared, text recognised, pages stitched into one PDF.
Marked text and images are deleted from the file, not covered by a box, and saved as a new copy.
AES-256 to open, plus an owner password that stops printing, copying or editing. Opening protected files is free.
Drag pages in one grid, rotate or delete them, pull in pages from another file, extract or split.
Also in the box: tabs you can peek into, bookmarks and comments, a palette that docks or floats, four themes, Home with your folders, a fonts check, and diagnostics you read before you send them.
How it compares
| Preview | Better PDF | Acrobat Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free · Pro from $9.99 once | $19.99 / month |
| Certificate and USB token signing | — | ✓ Free | ✓ |
| Fill flat, scanned forms | — | ✓ Free | ✓ |
| Edit text in place | — | ✓ Pro | ✓ |
| Redaction | — | ✓ Pro | ✓ |
| Password protection | ✓ | Free: open · Pro: protect and remove | ✓ |
| Convert to Word, images, text, Markdown, CSV | — | ✓ Free · Word Pro | ✓ |
| Scan from iPhone | ✓ (Continuity Camera, no cleanup) | ✓ Free | ✓ (mobile app) |
| OCR on device | — | ✓ Free | ✓ (cloud) |
| E‑ink and night reading | — | ✓ Free | — |
| No account, nothing uploaded | ✓ | ✓ | — |
Privacy
No analytics, no crash upload, no sign-in.
The direct download checks betterpdf.co once a day for updates and sends no system profile; turn it off in Settings. RFC 3161 time-stamps are off until you turn them on, and send only a hash.
Help › Diagnostics writes a zip you read first. Nothing is sent on its own.
Editions
| Mac App Store | Direct download | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free · Pro from $9.99 once | Free · Pro from $9.99 once |
| Pro licence | Universal Purchase, Family Sharing | Licence key, up to 3 Macs, deactivate any time |
| iPhone and iPad | Pro included, same Apple Account | Pro included, same licence key |
| Sandboxed | ✓ | — |
| Updates | Through the App Store | In-app, once a day, off in Settings |
| Certificate signing: keychain and CryptoTokenKit tokens | ✓ | ✓ |
| USB tokens via a PKCS#11 driver, e.g. Watchdata ProxKey | — needs the direct download | ✓ |
| Crash reports in Diagnostics | — | ✓ |
| Family Sharing | ✓ | — |
| Download size | — | 18 MB |
Free · Pro from $9.99 once
Coming to the Mac App StoreFree · Pro from $9.99 once
Download for MacSame app, same bundle, same files, same price. Pick the store for Family Sharing; pick the download if your token needs its PKCS#11 driver.
Pro is one payment in either edition: $9.99 for the first 100 buyers, $19.99 up to 500, $29.99 after that.
Pricing
Seven days of full Pro on first launch, then reading, filling and signing stay free for good. No account, no subscription. Pro is a single payment, the same price in the App Store and from betterpdf.co. One purchase. Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Mac App Store · Direct
$0forever
$9.99founder price, first 100 · one-time
Try all of Pro for seven days on first launch. One purchase. Mac, iPhone and iPad.
App Store: Universal Purchase for Mac, iPhone and iPad, Family Sharing · betterpdf.co: one licence key for up to 3 Macs, 1 iPhone and 1 iPad, deactivate any time · Apple silicon and Intel
Keyboard
For reading, filling, signing, scanning and converting, yes, and it can flatten a filled form when you are done. Keep the built-in viewer for Quick Look and for images.
Yes, with Pro. Tools › PDF to Word, or File › Export As (⇧⌘E), reads the layout on your Mac and writes a .docx: headings become Word headings, tables stay tables, images come along, and a live preview shows the result before you save. Nothing is uploaded. Fonts are not embedded in the .docx, so Word shows the text in the closest font you have installed. Images, text, Markdown and CSV are free.
Choose a keychain certificate, smart card or USB token and Better PDF writes a PAdES signature (CMS) as an incremental update. An RFC 3161 timestamp is optional, in Settings › Signing. You can also draw or type a visual signature.
Your documents never do. There is no account, no analytics and no crash upload. The direct download checks betterpdf.co once a day for updates and sends no system profile (off in Settings › General); time-stamps, if you turn them on, send only a hash. Diagnostics are a zip you save and send yourself.
Editing, signature styles, redaction, password protection, PDF to Word, merge and split, Scan’s extra filters and long scans, Mineral and Gallery and every icon pack; the rest of the list is marked coming. One payment, no subscription: $9.99 for the first 100 buyers (the founder price), $19.99 up to 500, $29.99 after that, in both editions. Pro ships in 1.0 with a seven-day full trial on first launch; after that, reading, filling and signing stay free. On the App Store it is a Universal Purchase with Family Sharing; from betterpdf.co it is a licence key for up to three Macs you can deactivate any time.
Yes, both editions. One purchase. Mac, iPhone and iPad. Better PDF for iPhone and iPad is free, with nothing to buy in its first version. When iOS Pro arrives in a later version, a Mac App Store purchase unlocks it under the same Apple Account, and a betterpdf.co licence key activates on iPhone and iPad too: scan the code in the Mac’s Settings › Licence, or type the key. One licence works on up to three Macs, one iPhone and one iPad. Need more devices? Email hello@evenpine.com and we will usually add them.
Yes. Smart cards and tokens with a CryptoTokenKit driver work in both editions. Tokens that need a PKCS#11 driver, such as the Watchdata ProxKey, need the direct download. Your PIN can stay in the Keychain behind Touch ID.
Any. E‑ink is an appearance, not a driver, and Better PDF remembers it per display: the e‑ink screen stays in e‑ink, your main display stays as it was.
Same app, same price. The store adds Family Sharing; the direct download adds PKCS#11 USB tokens and crash reports in Diagnostics. The editions table above has the rest.
Notarized by Apple · no account · macOS 26 or later · 18 MB