Stretch Your Budget With Acrobat AlternativesStretch Your Budget With Acrobat Alternatives

If you're looking for a free, functional alternative to Adobe Acrobat, then I have bad news and good news. Here's the bad news: No single application can do everything that Acrobat does. Here's the good news: No single application tries to do everything that Acrobat does.Once upon a time, when the earth was young and dinosaurs ruled the land, Adobe Acrobat was still a lean, mean, portable document machine. Today, of course, PDF rules the land -- and Acrobat has evolved into one of the most powerful, feature-packed business productivity tools money can buy.

Of course, one person's "evolution" is another person's "bloat." If your business needs everything Adobe Acrobat has to offer, then my advice is simple: Go buy it. You won't find anything, at any price, that beats Acrobat in a feature-by-feature showdown.

If your business needs something less, however, then I suggest taking a close look at some of the open-source, free applications that duplicate some of Acrobat's key features. Here are a couple of good places to start:

Sumatra PDF. If you're looking for an application that allows you to view and print PDF documents -- and nothing else -- then Sumatra PDF is a great product. Like Acrobat Reader, it is available free of charge; unlike Acrobat Reader, it is small and highly portable: It won't install anything on your system except the actual excutable file, it starts up instantly, and it adds almost no overhead even to an older, underpowered PC. You won't find a more bare-bones PDF viewer than Sumatra, but that is likely to suit a lot of business users just fine.

PDF Creator. As PDF evolves into a de facto cross-platform document format, the ability to create PDF documents quickly and easily is getting more important. PDF Creator makes this process drop-dead simple: It can turn almost any desktop document or graphics format into a great-looking PDF file, and it will do the job without costing you a dime. Like Acrobat Distiller, PDF Creator installs as a desktop printer, allowing you to access it from any other document-creation or graphics tool.

One of the things I like about PDF Creator is the fact that it is very efficient; in many cases, it will give you a print-ready PDF file that is considerably smaller than what you'll get from many other PDF creation tools. PDF Creator also supports other popular features, such as document security/encryption and the ability to merge multiple files into a single PDF document. Bear in mind, however, that PDF Creator does not provide nearly as many PDF editing, tracking, and document-management tools; the more you find yourself looking for these types of advanced features, the more likely you are to be happy with a commercial product such as Adobe Acrobat.