I Trust These Open-Source Apps For All My PDF Editing
How-To Geek, Tuesday, March 17th, 2026
Why pay for Adobe Acrobat or risk your data with online editors when excellent open-source PDF tools offer powerful, private alternatives? These PDF editors give you complete control over your documents and are free of cost.
While it's true that open-source PDF editors with comprehensive editing capabilities are pretty rare, it's not hard to find apps that can do a specific set of PDF tasks and do them well. So, here are my top picks for your PDF editing needs.
LibreOffice Draw - A new way to manipulate PDFs
Part of the LibreOffice suite, which is a solid alternative to Microsoft Office, Draw is technically not a PDF editor. It's a vector graphics editor. However, it packs several capabilities that allow it to manipulate PDF files.