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Adobe Acrobat vs Stirling PDF: catalog facts
Adobe Acrobat	Stirling PDF
Freemium Acrobat Reader is free to download and use without a subscription; text and image editing…	Freemium Free plan is $0/month with no card required (60+ tools, web/desktop/self-hosted, 500…
Windows, macOS, Web, Android, iOS	Windows, macOS, Linux, Web, Self-hosted
Free Reader for Windows 10/11, macOS 10.15+, iOS 16+ and Android 8+, plus an Acrobat web app in… Reader includes commenting, highlights, sticky notes, form filling and Fill & Sign at no cost	55+ PDF tools covering signing, converting, merging, editing, OCR and redaction, chained in a stateful workspace with… Runs on Docker, bare metal, Kubernetes or as native desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux
Editing text and images, creating and converting PDFs need an Acrobat Standard or Pro subscription Proprietary; Adobe logos may not be used without a license	Open-core: SSO, external database, Google Drive integration, SAML and audit logs are gated behind paid Team or… Manual server setup needs Java 25+ plus LibreOffice and Tesseract for conversions and OCR
Downloadable app, Web application, Hosted service	Self-hosted, Downloadable app, Web application, Hosted service
Closed source	Open source
License not stated	License: MIT
Not stated if an account is needed	No account needed
Not stated if it works offline	Works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 20, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 20, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.