Alternatives to Evince
GNOME's lightweight document viewer for PDF, PostScript and other document formats on Linux. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Evince
GNOME's lightweight document viewer for PDF, PostScript and other document formats on Linux.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Evince.
Okular
Universal document viewer for PDF, EPUB, comics, DjVu and more.
Okular reads more formats including EPUB, comics and DjVu, stores annotations separately and runs on Windows and macOS, but pulls in KDE libraries.
MuPDF
Compact, very fast PDF and XPS viewer with a command-line toolkit.
MuPDF is a very fast minimal viewer available on Linux, Windows, macOS and mobile, with a keyboard-driven interface and bundled mutool.
Sioyek
A PDF reader built for textbooks and research papers, with keyboard control and quick jumps to figures and references.
Sioyek is built for textbooks and papers, with figure and reference overlays and keyboard control, though its last tagged release is from December 2022.
Foxit PDF Reader
Free PDF reader with annotation, form filling and signing.
Foxit PDF Reader is closed-source freeware with fuller annotation, form filling and signing, and its installer promotes paid products.
Xournal++
Handwritten notes and PDF annotation with a stylus, including on top of lecture slides and scanned papers.
Xournal++ focuses on stylus annotation and handwritten notes over PDFs rather than plain reading, and does not open PostScript files.
Master PDF Editor
Cross-platform PDF editor with a Linux build that people actually use.
Master PDF Editor is a closed-source Linux editor with forms, signatures and OCR, where the unregistered version is non-commercial only.
Papers
A GNOME document viewer for reading, searching and annotating PDFs, DjVu, TIFF and comics.
Papers is a newer GNOME viewer with PDF annotation and highlighting and an adaptive interface for small screens, still Linux only.
Atril
The MATE desktop's multi-page document viewer for PDF, PostScript, DjVu, XPS and comics.
Atril is the MATE desktop's viewer with a traditional interface, opening PDF, PostScript, DjVu, XPS and comics, and remains view-only.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Evince as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
PDF Tools
Emacs package for viewing, searching and annotating PDF files inside the editor.
Evince is GNOME's simple Linux document viewer for PDF and PostScript, running as a desktop app rather than inside the editor.
qpdfview
A tabbed Qt document viewer for PDF, PostScript and DjVu files.
Evince is GNOME's simple Linux document viewer for PDF and PostScript, with an interface that fits GNOME rather than qpdfview's configurable tabbed Qt layout.
Xreader
Linux Mint's document viewer for PDF, PostScript, DjVu, XPS and comic book files.
Evince is GNOME's lightweight viewer for PDF and PostScript, fitting the GNOME desktop rather than Linux Mint's Cinnamon-oriented design.
zathura
A minimal, keyboard-driven document viewer with plugin support for PDF, PostScript and DjVu.
Evince is GNOME's GPL document viewer with a simple mouse-driven interface and graphical settings instead of vim-like keys and text-file configuration.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Poppler
PDF rendering library with pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo tools.
Ghostscript
PostScript and PDF interpreter behind a great deal of other software.
PDF Arranger
Drag PDF pages into the order you want, rotate them, crop them, and merge two files together.
Skim
macOS PDF reader and annotator built for reading papers.
Sumatra PDF
A small, fast, open-source reader for PDF, EPUB, MOBI, CBZ, DjVu and other documents on Windows.
