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Foxit Reader vs Okular
March 10, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
13★
Foxit Reader is a lightweight, fast, and secure PDF Reader capable of high-volume processing.
9★
The Universal Document Viewer. Multi-platform, fast and packed with features, Okular allows you to read PDF documents, comics and EPub books, browse images, visualize Markdown documents, and much more.
See also:
Top 10 PDF Readers for Business
Top 10 PDF Readers for Business
Foxit Reader and Okular are, at first glance, two perfectly respectable pieces of software that allow you to open, read and occasionally glare at PDFs. They both offer annotation tools so you can scrawl important thoughts like "Remember to actually read this later" in neon yellow and they even let you search for words, which is incredibly useful when you need to pretend you've read an entire 500-page document in under a minute. They also work on multiple operating systems, which is either a blessing or a curse depending on how much time you enjoy spending configuring things.
Foxit Reader, a creation of a company from the USA that has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how to make businesses slightly less miserable, was first launched in 2004. It has a sleek, Office-style interface designed to make you feel like you are doing Very Important Things. It even offers cloud integration, because no modern software is complete without trying to put everything you own onto someone else’s computer. The free version comes with ads, which means it will occasionally remind you, in a friendly but insistent way, that you could be having a much better time if you just paid up.
Okular, on the other hand, hails from the KDE community, which means it was built by open-source enthusiasts who believe software should be free, slightly unpredictable and occasionally mind-blowingly powerful. Released in 2007, it supports an almost suspicious number of file formats, including ones you’ve probably never heard of but now feel vaguely guilty for not using. It integrates beautifully with KDE desktops, assumes you enjoy customization and never, ever interrupts you with ads—because true believers in free software know that nothing ruins a good reading experience faster than an unexpected sales pitch.
See also: Top 10 PDF Readers
Foxit Reader, a creation of a company from the USA that has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how to make businesses slightly less miserable, was first launched in 2004. It has a sleek, Office-style interface designed to make you feel like you are doing Very Important Things. It even offers cloud integration, because no modern software is complete without trying to put everything you own onto someone else’s computer. The free version comes with ads, which means it will occasionally remind you, in a friendly but insistent way, that you could be having a much better time if you just paid up.
Okular, on the other hand, hails from the KDE community, which means it was built by open-source enthusiasts who believe software should be free, slightly unpredictable and occasionally mind-blowingly powerful. Released in 2007, it supports an almost suspicious number of file formats, including ones you’ve probably never heard of but now feel vaguely guilty for not using. It integrates beautifully with KDE desktops, assumes you enjoy customization and never, ever interrupts you with ads—because true believers in free software know that nothing ruins a good reading experience faster than an unexpected sales pitch.
See also: Top 10 PDF Readers
