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Open source alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

We track 5 open-source Adobe Acrobat alternatives, of which 4 currently score 70 or above on Repoly's GitHub health scale and 5 ship a Docker image. Stirling-PDF leads on health at 100/100 with 634 commits in the last 90 days; across all 5 projects you are choosing between AGPL-3.0, Apache-2.0, GPL-3.0 and 1 other licences.

5
Alternatives
142k
Combined stars
871
Commits / 90 days
5
With Docker
Licence family Licence

Showing 5 of 5 tools

All 5 Adobe Acrobat alternatives, ranked by health

  • Top pick · highest health

    Stirling-PDF

    100 GOOD

    Local hosted web application that allows you to perform various operations on PDF files, such as merging, splitting, file conversions and OCR.

    ★ 92k · ⟳ today · v2.14.3 · Apache-2.0

    DockerJava
    Website ↗ Source ↗

  • BentoPDF

    97 GOOD

    Powerful, privacy-first, client-side PDF toolkit that allows you to manipulate, edit, merge, and process PDF files directly in your browser.

    ★ 15k · ⟳ today · v2.8.8 · AGPL-3.0

    DockerNodejs
    Website ↗ Source ↗

  • Gotenberg

    96 GOOD

    Developer-friendly API to interact with powerful tools like Chromium and LibreOffice for converting numerous document formats (HTML, Markdown, Word, Excel, etc.) into PDF files, and more.

    ★ 13k · ⟳ yesterday · v8.37.0 · MIT

    Docker
    Website ↗ Source ↗

  • ConvertX

    89 GOOD

    Online file converter which supports over a thousand different formats.

    ★ 19k · ⟳ today · v0.18.0 · AGPL-3.0

    Docker
    Website ↗ Source ↗

  • Docspell

    68 SLOWING

    Auto-tagging document organizer and archive.

    ★ 2.3k · ⟳ 2 days ago · v0.43.0 · GPL-3.0

    DockerScalaJava
    Website ↗ Source ↗

Adobe Acrobat alternatives: common questions

What is the most maintained open source alternative to Adobe Acrobat?

Stirling-PDF scores highest at 100/100, with 634 commits in the last 90 days, 92k GitHub stars and its latest release (v2.14.3) published 1 months ago. It is also the most active by raw commit count.

Which Adobe Acrobat alternatives use a permissive licence?

2 of 5 are permissively licensed (MIT, Apache, BSD or similar): Stirling-PDF (Apache-2.0), Gotenberg (MIT). 3 use copyleft licences such as GPL or AGPL, which require you to publish changes if you distribute a modified version.

Which Adobe Acrobat alternatives run in Docker?

5 of 5 publish a Docker image or Compose file: Stirling-PDF, BentoPDF, Gotenberg, ConvertX, Docspell. Docker support contributes 10 of the 100 available health points, because it is the clearest signal that self-hosting is a supported path rather than an afterthought.