Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for Contract Markup (Tested)

Someone has emailed you a vendor contract as a PDF and you need to highlight three clauses, add a comment, and maybe black out a bank account number before you forward it. That is not a job that needs a paid Adobe Acrobat subscription. It needs about five minutes and a tool that can actually do the four things contract markup requires: highlight, comment, redact, and fill or sign. We tested the real free options against Acrobat, including Weave, the free browser tool Adira (which publishes this guide and sells contract review and CLM software) built for exactly this job, so this comparison is not neutral in the strictest sense, but every claim below is checkable and every gap in the free tools is stated plainly, including the gaps in Weave.

What "markup" actually means, and what you are really paying Acrobat for

Contract markup is four separate jobs people lump together: highlighting text, adding a comment, redacting (permanently removing, not just covering) a sensitive line, and filling in or signing a form. Acrobat Reader, Adobe's own free product, already does the first, second, and fourth for free. What you pay Acrobat Pro for is almost entirely the third: true redaction, plus a few editing conveniences. That is worth knowing before you shop for an "alternative" to something that already has a free tier. A highlight or comment does not change the contract itself; it is a request, not an edit. For the full distinction between marking a PDF up and actually redlining the words, see How to Mark Up a PDF Contract in the Browser.

The comparison, tested

Acrobat Pro in India currently costs ₹638.38/month, and Acrobat Standard, which drops redaction, costs ₹477.90/month, both billed annually (Adobe's own pricing page, last checked September 2026; Adobe changes regional pricing without much notice, so verify before you decide). Here is how the free routes stack up against that.

Tool	Highlight	Comment	Redact (true?)	Fill/sign	Free tier limits	Signup/credit card	Watermark	Data: uploaded or local?
Acrobat Pro (paid, the baseline)	Yes	Yes	Yes, genuine	Yes, incl. certificate signing	None, but ₹638/month	Adobe ID + card for the trial, auto-bills after	None	Local by default; Document Cloud is opt-in
Acrobat Reader (Adobe's own free tier)	Yes	Yes	No, Pro-only	Yes, fill and sign	None for these features	No card to download; cloud sign-in is skippable	None	Local by default; cloud save is opt-in
Browser-native (Chrome, Firefox, Edge)	Yes	Yes	No true redaction tool	Fill yes; signature is a drawn or typed image, not certified	None, fully free	None	None	Local, the file stays in the browser tab
Xodo	Yes, free	Yes, free	Partial: 1 free permanent redaction/day via the web tool, then paywalled	Yes, free	1 redaction/day on the web tool; reader app is unlimited for highlight/comment	None for the reader app	None found	Reader app is local; the web redact/editor tool uploads to Xodo's servers
PDFgear	Yes, free	Yes, free	Yes, marketed as permanent deletion (verify with the test below)	Yes, free	None stated	None	None	Desktop app is local/offline; the pdfgear.com web tools upload
LibreOffice Draw	Weak: PDF pages import as flat images, so a "highlight" is really a drawn box, not a real annotation	Yes, genuine pop-up comments are supported	No tool at all; a black box you draw is not redaction	Weak: no real form-fill; a signature is a manually placed image	None, fully free forever	None	None	100% local, no online component at all
Foxit PDF Reader	Yes, free	Yes, free	No, locked to paid Foxit Editor Pro/Business	Yes, free (image, handwritten, or DocuSign-linked)	None for these features	None	None on the free Reader (the paid Editor's trial does watermark exports)	Local
Weave (Adira, free)	Yes	Yes	Not built for this; Weave is a review tool, not a redaction tool	Not built for this; pair it with a free e-sign tool	None, fully free	None, no login	None	In-browser; the file is never uploaded

Notes on each tool, from actually using them

Browser-native (Chrome, Firefox, Edge). The fastest option for a quick pass: open the PDF in a tab, highlight and comment with the built-in toolbar, save, done. The catch is redaction: none of the three browsers has one. If you try to "redact" by drawing a black rectangle in the browser's own annotation layer, the original text is still sitting underneath it, selectable and copyable. That is fine for a highlight, dangerous for a redaction.

Xodo. Good highlight and comment tools, and unusually, a real redaction feature, but it lives mainly on Xodo's website (xodo.com/redact-pdf), which means the file goes to their server, and it is capped at one free permanent redaction a day before it pushes you toward a paid trial. Fine for an occasional single line; not built for redacting a whole document for free.

PDFgear. The most complete free set we tested: highlight, comment, redaction that claims to actually delete the underlying text, and fill and sign, all with no watermark and no signup. The desktop app runs offline, which is the version worth using for a confidential contract; the website version works the same way most online converters do, by uploading the file first.

LibreOffice Draw. Technically free and it will open a PDF, but it is the weakest tool here for contract markup specifically. LibreOffice imports each PDF page as a flattened image and only writes one real annotation type, a pop-up text comment; a "highlight" is a drawn rectangle sitting on top of the page image, not a standard PDF annotation object, so it can look fine in LibreOffice and display oddly, or not at all, when the other side opens the same file in Acrobat or their phone's PDF viewer. Genuinely free and fully offline, but the least reliable choice if you need your marks to survive the trip to someone else's screen.

Foxit PDF Reader. A close cousin of Acrobat Reader: solid free highlight, comment, and fill-and-sign, no signup wall, no watermark. Redaction sits behind Foxit's paid Editor Pro or Business tier, same split as Adobe, and Foxit's own support content confirms the free Reader does not include it.

Weave. Built specifically for reading and marking up a contract clause by clause in the browser, with no account and no upload. It is strong exactly where the free alternatives above are weakest on privacy: nothing leaves your device. It does not try to be a redaction tool or an e-signature tool, so for those two jobs, pick from the table above or see the sources on signing linked in the FAQ.

The privacy test: watch where the file actually goes

Every "data: uploaded or local" claim in that table is checkable in under a minute, and you should check it yourself before trusting a "free PDF tool" website with a contract:

1. Open your browser's developer tools (F12 on Windows, Cmd+Option+I on a Mac) and click the Network tab.
2. Clear the log (the circle-with-a-slash icon), then leave the Network tab open.
3. Open or drag your PDF into the tool you are testing.
4. Watch the Network tab. A local tool shows little to nothing leave the machine. A tool that uploads your file shows a POST request, often labelled upload, convert, or similar, to the tool's own domain, with a request size close to your file's size.
5. If you see that POST request, your contract left your computer. That may be perfectly fine for a routine template; it is worth knowing before you run a confidential vendor agreement or someone's employment contract, with their salary and bank details in it, through an unfamiliar site.

This is also where India's data protection law becomes relevant, not because marking up a PDF is itself a legal act, but because a contract that names another person, with a salary figure, an address, or an ID number, is personal data under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Sending it to a server you know nothing about is a real question worth asking, not a legal formality; see DPDP Act for Contracts for what that means in practice.

The redaction honesty problem: a black box is not deletion

This is the single most misunderstood part of "free PDF redaction," and it is worth stating plainly: drawing a black rectangle over text is not redaction. It is a highlight in a dark colour. The original text is almost always still there in the PDF's underlying data, and it can be recovered by simply selecting the text under the box and copying it, or in worse cases, by extracting the raw text layer from the file directly.

Run this test on anything a tool calls "redacted" before you trust it, in any tool, free or paid:

1. Open the "redacted" PDF.
2. Click and drag to select the area covered by the black box, as if you were trying to highlight the hidden text.
3. Copy it (Ctrl+C) and paste it into a plain text editor, like Notepad.
4. If the hidden text appears, the redaction is fake, a visual cover only. If nothing pastes, or gibberish pastes, the text itself was actually removed.

This is not a hypothetical risk. A 2022 academic paper, "Story Beyond the Eye: Glyph Positions Break PDF Text Redaction" (Bland, Iyer, and Levchenko), examined popular PDF redaction tools and found that even some tools marketed as doing permanent redaction can leave behind recoverable information, such as the precise on-page position of the glyphs that were supposedly deleted, which is enough in some cases to reconstruct the hidden text. The safest practice for a genuinely sensitive figure, a bank account number, a salary, a personal ID, is to run the copy-paste test above after redacting, in whichever tool you used, every single time, not just the first time you try a new tool.

What breaks

• LibreOffice Draw's marks may not survive the trip. Because it treats the PDF page as an image and writes only one real annotation type, a highlight you draw there can display as a stray box, in the wrong position, or not at all, when the recipient opens the file in Acrobat, Foxit, or their phone's default viewer. Test by reopening your saved file in a second, different app before you send it.
• A drawn or typed signature is not a certified digital signature. Every tool in the table above, including Acrobat's own free Fill & Sign, can add a signature-looking image or typed name to a PDF, and that is enough to form a valid contract in India under the general law of electronic records. It is not, however, the same as the stronger, cryptographically backed signature category the IT Act treats as presumptively secure. If that distinction matters for the document you are signing, see Electronic Signature Validity in India.
• Online "editor" pages are not the same product as the desktop app of the same name. Xodo and PDFgear both offer a downloadable, offline app and a website version, and only the desktop app keeps the file local; the website version works like any other online converter, upload first, process on their server, download the result.
• "Free" redaction from a paid tool's trial usually means a watermark, not a genuine free tier. Foxit's paid Editor Pro trial, for instance, stamps a notice onto every page you edit until you buy it; that is different from Foxit's actual free Reader, which has no watermark but also no redaction tool at all.

Which one to actually use

For a quick highlight-and-comment pass on a contract you are about to discuss on a call, your browser is enough, or Weave if you would rather work clause by clause with nothing to install. For one sensitive line that genuinely needs to disappear, PDFgear's desktop app or a single use of Xodo's redact tool both work, provided you run the copy-paste test afterwards. For a document you will only ever open once and never need to share cleanly, LibreOffice Draw is acceptable; for anything you are sending back to another party, Foxit Reader or Xodo's app are more reliable. Reach for Acrobat Pro specifically when you are redacting a whole document at volume, need certificate-based signing, or your organisation already pays for it.

FAQ

Do I need Acrobat Pro just to comment on a contract? No. Acrobat Reader, Adobe's free product, already does highlighting, commenting, and fill and sign at no cost. Pro's real advantage over the free tools here is genuine redaction and a few editing conveniences, not basic markup.

Is a black box over text in a free PDF tool real redaction? Not automatically. Many tools only draw a black rectangle on top of the text, which stays selectable and copyable underneath. Test any "redacted" document by trying to select and copy the text under the box; if it pastes into Notepad, it was never actually removed.

Which free tool keeps my contract fully private? Anything that runs locally: your browser's built-in viewer, the LibreOffice or PDFgear or Foxit desktop apps once downloaded, or Weave, which processes the file in your browser without an upload. Run the Network tab test in this guide to confirm for yourself rather than taking a website's word for it.

Is a signature I add with a free tool legally valid in India? Generally yes for forming a contract, since Indian law recognises electronic records and signatures broadly, but a drawn or typed signature is not the same category as a certificate-backed digital signature. See Electronic Signature Validity in India for which situations need the stronger kind.

Can I fully replace Acrobat Pro with free tools for a small legal or ops team? For highlighting, commenting, filling forms, and light redaction, yes, using a mix of the tools in this comparison. For high-volume redaction across many documents, batch processing, or certificate-based signing at scale, the paid tiers of Acrobat or Foxit still do more than any single free option.

Why does LibreOffice Draw handle PDFs worse than the other tools here? Because it was built as a drawing and presentation editor that happens to open PDFs, not a dedicated PDF tool. It converts each page to an image and supports only one real PDF annotation type, so marks made there can look different, or vanish, when the file is opened in a proper PDF reader afterward.

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This guide compares what free tools can and cannot do to a PDF contract, tested directly, as of September 2026. Tool features, free-tier limits, and pricing change without much notice, so re-check the specific claim that matters to you before you rely on it. It does not tell you whether a clause you are marking up is enforceable, or whether a redaction you made is sufficient for a specific legal or regulatory requirement; that depends on the document and often needs a lawyer's judgment, not just the right software.