Redaction Tools
Adobe
Adobe Acrobat: pricing, features and limits
The incumbent PDF editor, with redaction behind a paid tier.
Adobe Acrobat costs from $22.99 USD per month, as of 17 September 2026.
Key facts
- Vendor
- Adobe
- Headquarters
- US
- Media
- Deployment
- desktop, online
- Method
- manual-redaction
- Free tier
- No
- Trial
- 7-day trial
- Entry price
- $22.99 per month
Plans and pricing
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free trial | 7-day trial | — |
| Acrobat Pro | $22.99 per month | Search and redact · Sanitize document · Batch redaction |
read automatically from the vendor · entered by our editors · supplied by the vendor and not independently verified. Check the vendor's pricing page.
Our assessment
Acrobat is the reference implementation of PDF editing, and its redaction tool is correspondingly thorough: it removes the underlying content, strips metadata through a separate sanitization step, and can apply redaction patterns across a batch of files. For organisations that already standardise on Acrobat, redaction is a feature they have rather than a tool they buy.
What it is not is cheap or automatic. Detection is pattern-based and manual rather than model-driven, so finding every instance of a name across a long document is the operator's problem. The 7-day trial is a trial, not a free tier - redaction is unavailable on the free Acrobat Reader entirely, which is the single most common misunderstanding about this product.
Strengths
- Removes underlying content and metadata properly
- Batch redaction across many files
- Already deployed in most large organisations
Limitations
- No free tier; redaction is absent from Acrobat Reader
- Detection is manual and pattern-based
- The most expensive per-seat option in this catalog