Wondershare PDFelement review

The popularity of the PDF format has resulted in lots of different applications for PDF documents, and as a result, a wide variety of tools to work on them. Some of the best PDF editors are very simple, offering little more than basic conversion features and perhaps some highlighting and other minor edits. Others are much more powerful, rivaling office suites in their editing capabilities. Finding a good PDF editor starts with identifying your own needs.

PDFelement lies somewhere in the middle between the two ends of the spectrum. While it’s not as powerful as some of the leading applications on this market, it’s not just a simple PDF editor either. It comes with various features that can be useful to a wide range of users, and can allow you to do some interesting things with your documents. However, it does suffer from having a higher price than most other tools in its class.

We reviewed the latest version of the software to see how it compares in a competitive field.

PDFElement: Pricing & plans

Wondershare PDFElement offers a 7-day free trial that provides access to the application’s features for a limited time, or for a limited number of uses (depending on the tool being selected). Beyond that, there are premium subscription plans which can be paid either for one or two years, as well as a perpetual licence option.

The cost of these subscriptions or licences depends on whether you need to invest in a cross-platform version, just require its use on a single one (namely, Windows, Macs, iOS or Android), and whether you’re an individual, a business, or in education. To give you a rough idea, a cross platform individual plan would cost you $90 for a year, $120 for two, or $140 for a perpetual licence. For alternatives, we tested the best free PDF editors.

PDFElement: Features

PDFelement offers a variety of features for editing documents. Standard markup features are available – users can change the font family and size of text, make it bold/underlined, highlight parts of the document, and even make various structural changes. The tool can also create PDFs from other file formats. Combined with its advanced batch operation support, this makes it a good choice for those who regularly need to convert large volumes of files and want a convenient and quick solution for that.

Documents can also be split into separate ones, protected with a password, and the application can automatically extract data from documents that have been scanned and run through its OCR engine. On that note, PDFelement does stand out with a reliable and robust OCR system that tends to work better than most of the competing solutions on the market. 

PDFElement: Interface & experience

The application resembles most modern office suites in its interface, and everything is exactly where you would expect to find it. Tools are sorted in several main tabs, with individual buttons providing access to specific features. Users who are familiar with document editing on a computer should have no problem navigating the menus of PDFelement, including those who want to do more advanced edits.

The only complaint we have in this regard is that the interface can occasionally seem a bit big, especially on smaller screens. There aren’t many options for configuring the application’s appearance, and if you don’t enjoy its style of using large buttons for everything, you might be a bit displeased. Other than that, there aren’t any major issues that stand out with the interface and presentation of PDFelement.

PDFElement: AI tools

A new addition to PDFElement is, you’ve guessed it, AI. AI is everywhere - we’ve even been testing out the best AI tools - so why not here, right? And there’s a lot you can do with AI within PDFElement. You can use it to discuss the content of your document with it, translate it, check the grammar, or summarise it, among others. Most of these features have been available elsewhere, such as Google’s services for instance, but here you can do it all without having to leave the interface, which can and is a great time saver.

There is a major drawback: these AI features aren’t included in the fee you pay Wondershare to use the application: every time you use an AI feature, you’ll spend a certain number of tokens to do so - the more complex the function, the more tokens you’ll need.

The free trial gives you 25 for ‘Content Processing’. All the other paid options give you 100. After that, you’ll need yet another subscription to get more: $4 a month (ie, $48 a year) for a million additional ones each month. If these features felt truly unique and revolutionary, it might be worth it for some, but as it stands, this almost feels like price gouging, seriously jacking up the cost of the app to $138 or $216 for the one or two-year subscription respectively. Thankfully you can keep using PDFElement without touching AI, no matter how much Wondershare tries to entice you through their promotional ads, and with prominent sections in the interface.

PDFElement: Support

Wondershare is a well-known name in the field of small tools and utilities, and one of the features the company stands out with is the quality of their customer support. You can expect issues to get resolved quickly and with a knowledgeable attitude, and that’s if you even need to contact their support in the first place. Many of your questions will likely already be answered in the knowledge base, so take a look around to see if your issue is addressed.

PDFElement: Final verdict

This is a well-designed PDF editor with various features that should keep most people happy, including some advanced users. While the application does lack certain features that are standard in other editors, it doesn’t leave anything critical to be desired. For the most part, it’s a more than adequate application with enough to satisfy the average user. If you’re looking for a long-term subscription though, you might want to explore other options, particularly editors that are offered for a one-time purchase as opposed to a recurring annual subscription. For a long enough period of time, PDFelement can actually get quite expensive, especially if you’re using the Pro version.

Should I buy Wondershare PDFElement?

For more top PDF tools, we reviewed the best Adobe Acrobat alternatives.