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PDF-XChange vs Sumatra PDF
March 10, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
4★
Those wishing to View/Modify or perform simple editing and even OCR Image based PDF files on their Windows PC's now have a FREE pdf reader alternative to the Adobe Reader! The PDF-XChange Viewer is smaller, faster and more feature rich than any other FREE PDF Reader/ PDF Viewer/ PDF Editor available.
11★
Sumatra PDF is a free PDF, eBook (ePub, Mobi), XPS, DjVu, CHM, Comic Book (CBZ and CBR) reader for Windows. Sumatra PDF is powerful, small, portable and starts up very fast. Simplicity of the user interface has a high priority.
See also:
Top 10 PDF Readers for Business
Top 10 PDF Readers for Business
PDF-XChange and Sumatra PDF are both Windows-based PDF readers, which means they share the remarkable ability to open a PDF file and display its contents—an achievement that, in the grand scheme of things, seems fairly fundamental but is still worth mentioning. They both let users search for words they vaguely remember seeing somewhere on page 43 but now desperately need, support bookmarks for pretending to be organized and come in portable versions for those who live in constant fear of installing things. Both also have free versions, which is excellent news until you realize that in one of them, "free" means "we’ll show you a lot of features you can’t use unless you pay us," and in the other, "free" means "we’ve removed all features so you can’t possibly complain about what’s missing."
PDF-XChange hails from the distant lands of Canada and has been around since 2001, which is about the time people started realizing that PDFs were here to stay and possibly take over the world. It is designed for people who think reading a PDF is a good start but really, why stop there when you could also annotate, stamp, highlight, scribble and perform Optical Character Recognition on your cat’s medical records just to see if it works? Professionals, businesses and anyone who enjoys clicking on a toolbar with far too many icons will find it a delightful playground of features they never knew they needed but now absolutely must have.
Sumatra PDF, on the other hand, comes from Poland and has been around since 2006, possibly as a reaction to the realization that sometimes people just want to read a PDF without engaging in a full-scale desktop publishing operation. It is fast, lightweight and does not burden users with unnecessary extras like "editing," "annotations," or "a complicated interface." It also supports an assortment of other file formats, including EPUB and CBZ, making it the digital equivalent of that friend who only carries one bag but somehow has everything you need. Sumatra appeals to people who appreciate efficiency, speed and software that does its job and then politely gets out of the way—qualities sorely lacking in most things, including traffic lights and toasters.
See also: Top 10 PDF Readers
PDF-XChange hails from the distant lands of Canada and has been around since 2001, which is about the time people started realizing that PDFs were here to stay and possibly take over the world. It is designed for people who think reading a PDF is a good start but really, why stop there when you could also annotate, stamp, highlight, scribble and perform Optical Character Recognition on your cat’s medical records just to see if it works? Professionals, businesses and anyone who enjoys clicking on a toolbar with far too many icons will find it a delightful playground of features they never knew they needed but now absolutely must have.
Sumatra PDF, on the other hand, comes from Poland and has been around since 2006, possibly as a reaction to the realization that sometimes people just want to read a PDF without engaging in a full-scale desktop publishing operation. It is fast, lightweight and does not burden users with unnecessary extras like "editing," "annotations," or "a complicated interface." It also supports an assortment of other file formats, including EPUB and CBZ, making it the digital equivalent of that friend who only carries one bag but somehow has everything you need. Sumatra appeals to people who appreciate efficiency, speed and software that does its job and then politely gets out of the way—qualities sorely lacking in most things, including traffic lights and toasters.
See also: Top 10 PDF Readers
