ABBYY FineReader PDF vs ONLYOFFICE Docs

Adobe Acrobat

Nitro PDF

iLovePDF

Adobe Acrobat is PDF editing software that can be used to create, convert and share PDF documents. It can convert documents in Microsoft Office formats to PDFs, and vice versa. PDFs can be viewed, annotated, and signed using Adobe Sign and the free Acrobat Reader mobile app.

Nitro PDF offers comprehensive PDF editing for individuals and teams on Windows, Mac, and iOS. Features include document creation, editing, conversion, digital signatures, and AI tools, such as Smart Redact for sensitive content removal. It integrates with various platforms, including Microsoft 365, MS SharePoint, and cloud storage while ensuring security compliance with standards such as SOC 2 and HIPAA.

iLovePDF is an online service that provides comprehensive tools for PDF document management. The platform offers features for organizing, optimizing, converting, editing, and securing PDF files, including merging, splitting, compressing, and converting PDFs to and from various formats. Available as both web and mobile applications, iLovePDF enables users to work with documents across different devices.

FineReader PDF empowers professionals to maximize efficiency in the digital workplace. Featuring ABBYY’s latest AI-based OCR technology, FineReader PDF makes it easier to digitize, retrieve, edit, protect, share, and collaborate on all kinds of documents in the same workflow.

Access Controls/Permissions

Annotations

Archiving & Retention

Batch Processing

Collaboration Tools

Commenting/Notes

Compression

Convert to PDF

Digital Signature

Document Capture

Document Generation

Document Storage

Electronic Signature

Encryption

File Conversion

File Sharing

Forms Management

Full Text Search

Image Editing

Image Pre-processing

Indexing

Merge/Append Files

Metadata Extraction

Multiple Output Formats

Offline Access

Optical Character Recognition

PDF Reader

Side-by-Side Comparison

Text Editing

Watermarking

Reviews for ABBYY FineReader PDF come from a wide variety of industries, including translation and localization (8% of reviewers), computer software (7%), and education management (7%). The most frequent use case for ABBYY FineReader PDF cited by reviewers is OCR (67% of reviewers).

Users and use cases

Reviewers indicate ABBYY FineReader PDF provides cost savings by replacing pricier alternatives, and some users say its quality and functionality justify the price. However, some reviewers find it expensive for occasional use and limited-feature needs.

Value for money

ABBYY FineReader PDF is an OCR program with key features that include PDF conversion, file merging, text editing, PDF viewing, full text search, and more.

ABBYY FineReader PDF

Windows

iPhone

iPad

Adobe Acrobat Reader

Soda PDF

Foxit PDF Editor

Tungsten Power PDF

Foxit PDF Reader

PDFelement

File Viewer Plus

Smallpdf

 FineReader PDF Standard for Windows

 FineReader PDF Corporate for Windows

 FineReader PDF for Mac

Inconsistent text conversion accuracy

Translator

Same thing for texts written in two, three, etc. columns: sometimes it merges two columns together and the resulting text makes no sense.

Sometimes, when the content of the pdf is "scattered" and not continuous, it breaks the content of the page into smaller parts that are recognised as "shapes" and, therefore, difficult to handle as text.

42% of reviewers feel negative about ABBYY FineReader’s text document conversion. Some users report that converting PDFs or images to text or Word files often results in formatting errors, scrambled text, or unrecognized special characters. Reviewers indicate that complex layouts, columns, or custom fonts can cause additional inaccuracies, requiring significant manual editing. They say the OCR sometimes struggles with calligraphic, handwritten, or tilted text, and that processing delays or missing correction tools make the workflow less efficient. Users feel these issues can be inconvenient, especially when handling important or intricate documents.

Enhanced daily work efficiency

Senior Manager

The ancillary screenshot reader tool is an underrated business tool for general daily productivity in admin tasks and integrates seamlessly into existing manual processes.

Detailer

Abbyy has allowed us to turn what used to be a very manual task into a simple copy paste method, meaning we can do far more work every day then we were capable of before.

93% of reviewers feel positive about ABBYY FineReader’s impact on productivity. Some users report that the software streamlines daily document management, reducing manual tasks and allowing them to accomplish more in less time. Reviewers appreciate that it helps avoid repetitive typing and supports both beginners and professionals in maintaining effectiveness at work or home. They find it indispensable for digitizing records and handling documents efficiently, noting significant time savings and improved workflow. Users indicate that the tool integrates well into various business processes, making it a reliable asset for boosting overall productivity.

Comprehensive PDF conversion tools

Customer Service Management

the best thing that I like is inbuilt OCR functionalities, it changed my PDF file into an editable format so that I can use text in ms word.

Software Engineer

The accuracy of the OCR engine has been great in our use cases where we already have pdf files and we are using this software to convert them to searchable pdf files.

94% of reviewers feel positive about ABBYY FineReader’s PDF conversion capabilities. Users think the software provides reliable and accurate PDF editing, OCR, and conversion to multiple formats such as Word and Excel. Some reviewers find the ability to maintain original formatting and fonts particularly valuable, and they appreciate the all-in-one approach for creating, editing, and organizing PDFs. They say the tool is essential for handling large volumes of PDF documents, extracting text, and converting scanned or image-based files into searchable, editable formats, which supports a wide range of professional needs.

I also like the fact that it allows you to edit PDF documents as they are, without the need for creating endless Word files, implementing changes and then converting them into new PDFs.

Ingeniero Civil

That it does not have very sophisticated image preprocessing, for example in the detection and elimination of signatures and seals, which in some cases makes pages saturated with them unrecognizable by ABBY FineReader.

president

Of course, the recognition rate is not as perfect as the Google lens, but when we process a lot of content, there is no such software, so we will continue to subscribe this year.

Teacher

Sometimes there are misreadings but this was often due to the quality of the file it was asked to scan.

Educational Neuropsychologist

The variaty of language one can use when using different litteratures and when scanning and converting documents as well as editing.

It is an essential tool for eliminating and digitizing paper books that occupy a lot of space.

Project Manager

I was able to research, perform a test trial, pitch to stakeholders and ultimately purchase and implement independently -- all of which I embraced for its efficiency.

Director of Development

The document management, document conversion, digital signatures, and the giant array of supported file types made this an easy choice for me.

Service Engineering

The best program for scanning books and documents on sheets, generating and editing PDF files

Professor

I think that the scanning smart functions could be better- I still have to do a lot of manual tweaking of every scanned page. and the navigation is not very intuitive.

Warehouse Executive

It is an excellent PDF editing tool that offers you an all-in-one PDF solution in one place.

Managing Director

Inability to draw a table with columns and than analysis the table without losing the columns.

This was a huge find for me as it can duplicate all that I needed from the Adobe products, and more, for a far more reasonable price.

Attorney

I like the feature of having the ability to recognize and make custom fonts searchable without embedding the font and making the pdf size larger.

Excellent product which allows our company to extract data from documents quickly.

It gives me the possibility to change resolution and other parameters, choose what I want to be recognised in a page and, furthermore, format tables etc so that the editable document produced is near enough to what I need.

Technical IT Support

I use ABBYY FineReader PDF to convert scanned PDFs to Excel or Word so that they can be edited, I have been using ABBYY FineReader PDF for more than 4 years and I like this application as it provided a great OCR feature.

It is great for editing PDFs and converting the images to documents

Key Account Manager

You have bad result if you want to recognize document in Greek (most part of diacritics are not well detected) and, with Hebrew, is literally a worst situation (you have not vowels and all diacritics). If you try to do by yourself, using custom OCR training, it's a very long journey and you don't even get a good result, and many times it's even not so clear if you are using your custom training set or not and even is really not clear why you cannot use one only feature to perform "verify" and "ocr training" in one only function/feature/action.

Product Manager

All this, combined with the incredibly good and fast support makes the product excellent for the needs of anyone who works with PDF files.

Graduate student researcher

I compared it versus a few python algorithms and ABBYY performed better and with the advantage of creating a searchable file.

That only sometimes renders a perfect conversion into Ms word that I can use to work, and I mean a file where I don't have to remake any parts of the text or recapture images, etc.

Flexible templates for reading data from similar documents.

Output to Excel (tables are really not fully detected, even text within cells, with a lot of work to do in the end) and Word (every text appear converted in annoying frames, difficult to remove or manage at all) mostly have to be really improved to be the best.

Associate Professor

Does better than Adobe in ocr-ing messy archival documents for historical research.

President

It would be nice if there was online storage for yours and phone app for ABBYY FineReader PDF.

The interface is very user-friendly; there are plenty of editing functions; and as a not very tech-savvy person, I should admit that I had no trouble finding out what each tool does and how to change settings.

Ability to edit PDF docs without too much training.

Owner

I use it mostly for OCR of scanned PDFs and it does a great job.

The most important this about this software is that it supports many languages more than any other OCR software, the OCR results are not very accurate for some languages but the OCR result for the English language is great.

The precisión to detect the characters has improved over the years and sometimes it can detect complex tables, which is nice to see, but regarding tables with not clear imprinted lines the program files to detect them at all.

Correcting all the above is time-consuming, which is contrary to the purpose of this program. And recently there is a contradiction between doing things in the main window of the OCR editor I'm doing them at the detailed window, for example if I try to select one cell to be treated as an image, it's conflicts the problem if I chose it at the main window or at the detail window, with the first one generally overriding the second.

ABBYY FineReader PDF makes the best OCR when I have a project with many pages.

Alternative Materials Specialist

I like the image copy and paste as the images are significantly better than Adobe Acrobat Pro, I like the conversion to a different format.

Overall has been a good experience and has allowed us to modify docs with some difficuties.

They now so I will not be moving back to Acrobat primarily because I hate their subscription services and pricing.

Researcher

It's not very good at reading lines as divisions of the paper

I upgraded to a newer version to get the ability to OCR Old German Script. While not as accurate as English, it still does probably 99% accuracy on a clean page.

It is easier to use because of less error than any other program.

I haven't come across a better program for scanning to PDF.

Aircraft Engine specialist

Have used ABBY exclusively to do document conversions for over 11 years now.  

Lead Instructor Mechanical Maintenance

Some of the text takes take to recognize using OCR feature which is already built inside ABBYY Finereader PDF.

The ABBYY FineReader PDF OCR tool supports all languages, especially the most complicated ones like Arabic language.

Learning curve to use all the features can be a bit tedious but not overwhelming.

I made it about 4 days into the trial before I purchased the full license.

Controller

Of course the sense of ABBYY FineReader PDF is to create full access PDF documents with readable text.

Sales Manager

maybe they can include AI in their OCR to convert text in Word or Excel exactly like the original version.

What I like most about Abby is the simplicity, the reliability and the speed which helps me very much to work fast and on my own speed.

PDF Conversion

Document Scanning

Text Document Conversion

Table Recognition

Document Management

Image Quality

Text Recognition

Pricing

Small Business

Freelancers

Large Enterprises

Mid-size Business

ABBYY Software House

Google Docs

Google Docs is an online word processor that lets businesses create and format text documents and collaborate with team members in real time.

Google Drive

Google Drive is a cloud storage and backup platform to access files, docs, photos & more, store them in a safe place, and collaborate with other people

Google Workspace

Google Workspace is a suite of applications from Google which offers a number of tools to communicate and collaborate with colleagues, store files, and manage data from all devices.

ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source collaborative office suite for docs, sheets, forms, slides, diagrams and PDFs, compatible with MS Office and equipped with an AI assistant. It integrates into 40+ document management services and can be used within ONLYOFFICE DocSpace, a collaborative platform. 

Alerts/Notifications

Approval Process Control

Customizable Branding

Customizable Templates

Data Import/Export

Document Automation

Document Editing

Document Review

Drag & Drop

File Recovery

Search/Filter

Secure Data Storage

SSL Security

Third-Party Integrations

Version Control

Open Source

ONLYOFFICE Docs

Web-based

Linux

Android

Chromebook

Microsoft Word

Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft 365

LibreOffice

Relayto

The Enterprise Edition Basic (for business)

The Enterprise Edition Plus (for business)

The Enterprise Edition Premium (for business)

Enterprise Edition (for home)

Freelance copywriter 

My biggest struggle is that it doesn't word count and although there are plugins with literally limitless functions and formulas, I've tried several times to add a word count plugin both officially form their help support and from search engine result assistance all to no avail.

Fast, free, and easy to sign up and start using (literally an email,  click to confirm, make a password, and login is done) and loaded with familiar and favorite formatting features, this word processing website leaves nothing to be desired except a quick way to word count.

It autosaves likes a beast and no matter where I am or where my laptop is I can ALWAYS access my documents online whenever I need them.

ABBYY FineReader PDF vs ONLYOFFICE Docs Comparison (2026)

ABBYY FineReader PDF

ONLYOFFICE Docs

Overview

Video & Screenshots

Pricing

User reviews

Key features

Integrations

Alternatives