Adobe Acrobat vs Okular

Adobe Acrobat and Okular, though both offering the service of displaying PDFs, approach the task much like two aliens who have crash-landed on Earth and decided to go about their day jobs in completely different ways. Adobe Acrobat, being the slick corporate entity from the well-financed planet Adobe, gleefully arrives on both Windows and macOS. It doesn’t just show you PDFs—it wants to take over your document universe. With features like advanced editing, form creation and OCR, it’s basically the Swiss Army knife of PDFs, though at the price of a robust subscription plan that makes your wallet wince. Oh and it has its head in the cloud, quite literally, integrating with Adobe Document Cloud for some suave collaboration.

Okular, on the other hand, wanders in from the open-source, Linux-loving corner of the galaxy, looking slightly disheveled but with an earnest smile. It’s designed for KDE and runs primarily on Linux, though it dabbles in Windows when it feels like it. Okular prefers simplicity—sure, it can read PDFs and a smattering of other formats and even lets you scribble on them if the mood strikes, but it’s more of a ‘viewing-and-annotating’ sort of chap. It’s free, open-source and proud of it, relying on the kindness of the user community for maintenance, rather than charging you like a high-end restaurant for extra bread.

Where Acrobat is the professional in a well-tailored suit, Okular is the laid-back friend who builds their own furniture and invites you over for a Linux-based potluck. Acrobat integrates into every nook and cranny of your workflow like it’s staging a corporate takeover, while Okular sticks closer to home in KDE, happy to offer customizable viewing modes and color schemes, but without all the flash.

See also: Top 10 PDF Readers