Best Paperknife Alternatives ranked by AI · updated Aug 2026

Paperknife is a lightweight PDF utility for macOS focused on organizing and manipulating document pages. It is intended for users who need to split, merge, reorder, rotate, or extract pages without a full document-production suite.

Developer: Paperknife Price: N/A 🎯 paperknife.app

📄 Document Management 📄 PDF macOS PDF Editing

Top 6 Paperknife alternatives

PDFgear

💡 Pick it for a free, full-featured PDF editor with annotation, conversion, and AI tools.

PDFgear is a free PDF editor and productivity suite with an AI chatbot for asking questions about documents. It is intended for...

Pros

Free access includes substantially more PDF editing than ChatPDF
Supports annotation, conversion, filling, and other common PDF tasks
AI chat is integrated directly into the PDF workflow

Cons

AI research and multi-document capabilities are less developed than NotebookLM
Interface and feature availability differ between desktop and web versions
Privacy and cloud-processing requirements should be checked for sensitive files

Free

Alternatives to PDFgear → Visit site

Adobe Acrobat

💡 Choose it for advanced PDF editing, OCR, forms, signatures, and enterprise document workflows.

Adobe Acrobat offers advanced OCR capabilities and a wide range of PDF editing features.

Pros

High OCR accuracy
Extensive PDF editing tools

Cons

Paid subscription required
Can be complex for basic users

Starting from $14.99/month

Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat →

PDF Expert

💡 Pick it for a polished Apple-native PDF reader with annotation, editing, and signing.

PDF Expert is a powerful PDF editor for Mac and iOS devices, offering advanced features for editing, annotating, and managing PDF documents.

$79.99 (one-time purchase)

Alternatives to PDF Expert → Visit site

Preview

💡 Use it if you want basic PDF viewing, page management, and annotation without installing another app.

Preview is a built-in app on macOS for viewing and editing images and PDFs.

Free

Alternatives to Preview → Visit site

Sejda PDF

💡 Choose it for browser-based PDF editing and conversion with a low-cost paid tier.

Sejda is an online PDF editor that allows users to edit, merge, split, compress, and convert PDF files.

Pros

Accessible online without installation
Supports various PDF editing tasks
Offers both free and paid versions

Cons

Limited features in the free version

Free / Paid

Alternatives to Sejda PDF →

Stirling PDF

Stirling Tools

💡 Pick it for an open-source, self-hosted PDF toolkit that keeps documents under your control.

Stirling PDF is an open-source PDF toolkit that can be self-hosted or used through hosted deployments. It supports merging, splitting, extracting, converting,...