Adobe Acrobat vs Adobe Reader

Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader are, in essence, two sides of the same coin—except one side is much shinier, significantly more expensive and comes with a suspiciously large number of buttons. Both were born from the depths of Adobe Inc., a company that, at some point, decided that digital paper was the way forward and that no one should ever have to deal with physical filing cabinets again. They both allow humans to stare at PDFs, print them and even scrawl questionable annotations in the margins, presumably to remind themselves later why they downloaded the document in the first place.

Adobe Acrobat, first unleashed upon the unsuspecting public in 1993, is the elder sibling that takes everything far too seriously. It insists on allowing you to create, edit and even convert PDFs into other unpronounceable formats. It possesses an uncanny ability to recognize text in scanned documents (a skill that many humans would pay good money for) and comes with e-signature features that make signing contracts almost too easy. Naturally, this makes it the go-to tool for lawyers, businesses and people who enjoy feeling important while moving virtual papers around.

Adobe Reader, which emerged a year later in 1994, is Acrobat’s laid-back, budget-conscious cousin. It looks at all those fancy editing features and says, “No, thanks, I’m good.” It prefers a simple life of opening PDFs, letting you read them, and, if it’s feeling particularly generous, allowing you to fill out a form or two. It does not concern itself with text recognition, elaborate document conversions or any of the complexities of the digital document world. Instead, it remains content in its noble purpose: to help the average person read a menu, a user manual or a terms-of-service agreement they will never actually finish.

See also: Top 10 PDF Readers