Adobe Acrobat Pro costs $22.99/month and is designed for PDF editing, forms, and signatures. If your main need is converting web pages to clean PDFs, you are paying for features you do not use. Here are the best alternatives — starting with the one purpose-built for web-to-PDF conversion.
Free — 3 PDFs per month. Pro from $5/month (vs Acrobat's $23/month).
Acrobat is the industry standard for PDF manipulation — but "industry standard" comes with industry-standard pricing and complexity.
Adobe Acrobat Pro costs $22.99/month on an annual plan ($29.99 month-to-month). That is $276/year for a tool that does far more than most people need. If you primarily save web content as PDFs — articles, documentation, research, emails — you are paying for a full PDF editing suite to do a job that requires a fraction of its features.
Acrobat is also heavy desktop software. It requires installation, regular updates, and significant disk space. For users who work primarily in a browser, launching a separate desktop application to convert a webpage feels like using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame.
The most common reasons people search for Acrobat alternatives:
Acrobat is a powerful tool. The question is whether you need that power.
Adobe Acrobat is the industry standard for comprehensive PDF manipulation. It excels at tasks that no lightweight alternative can match:
If your daily work involves editing existing PDFs, collecting signatures, processing scanned documents, or managing complex document workflows, Acrobat is the right tool. No alternative on this page replaces those capabilities.
But if your primary use case is saving web pages as clean, professional PDFs, Acrobat is expensive overkill — and it is not even particularly good at that specific task.
Acrobat's web-to-PDF feature is a footnote in a 500-page manual.
Acrobat captures the full page as rendered — navigation bars, ads, cookie banners, sidebars, and all. A news article that should be 3 clean pages becomes an 8-page mess with interface chrome on every page.
Every web-to-PDF conversion looks like a browser print. No fonts, no typography, no professional formatting. The output inherits whatever the website happens to look like, including broken print stylesheets.
A GitHub README, a Medium article, and a Stack Overflow answer all get the same generic treatment. Acrobat has no understanding of platform-specific page structures or content hierarchies.
Acrobat Pro's web-to-PDF is buried in a suite of features most web users never touch. You are paying for OCR, redaction, Bates numbering, and form builders to save a webpage as PDF.
Acrobat requires a desktop installation, consumes significant disk space and memory, and needs regular updates. For a task that happens in the browser, this adds unnecessary friction to the workflow.
Feature-by-feature comparison for the specific task of converting web content to PDF.
| Feature | Adobe Acrobat | Pretty PDF |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $23/mo (Acrobat Pro) | Free (3/mo) / $5/mo (Pro) |
| Content extraction | None — captures full page | Smart extraction removes ads/nav |
| Professional templates | None | 5 templates with embedded fonts |
| Site-specific parsing | None | 8 platforms (GitHub, Notion, etc.) |
| Chrome extension | Limited — basic page capture | Purpose-built with DOM preprocessing |
| Cloud PDF library | Yes — broad document management | Yes — web-saved PDF focus (Pro+) |
| PDF editing | Full editor — industry standard | Not included — different tool |
| Forms & signatures | Yes | Not included |
| OCR | Yes | Not included |
| Developer API | Yes — Adobe PDF Services | Yes — REST API (Pro+) |
Pretty PDF is purpose-built for one thing: turning web content into professionally styled PDFs. It does that one thing better than Acrobat because it was designed from the ground up for this specific workflow.
Pretty PDF's extraction engine identifies the main content on any webpage and strips away navigation, ads, sidebars, cookie banners, and interface chrome. A cluttered news article that Acrobat converts into an 8-page mess becomes a clean 3-page document. The extraction uses trafilatura with site-specific post-processing — not a simple "reader mode" clone.
Five templates — Clean, Minimal, Corporate, Academic, and Dark Mode — each with embedded Fraunces and Instrument Sans fonts. Your PDFs look consistent and professional regardless of what the source website looks like. Pro users can add custom headers, footers, logos, and branding.
Dedicated parsers for GitHub, Notion, Medium, Reddit, Confluence, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, and Substack. Each parser understands the platform's page structure and extracts content optimally. A GitHub README gets clean code blocks with monospace fonts. A Reddit post gets properly serialized comments. Acrobat treats every site identically.
Pretty PDF Pro is $5/month for 50 PDFs. Pro+ is $12/month for unlimited PDFs, cloud storage, and API access. Acrobat Pro is $23/month. If web-to-PDF is your primary use case, Pretty PDF saves you over $200 per year. The free tier gives you 3 PDFs per month with all templates — no credit card required.
If Pretty PDF is not the right fit, here are other tools worth evaluating.
Cheaper than Acrobat at ~$8/month with a similar feature set. Good for PDF editing, forms, and signatures. Same web-to-PDF limitations as Acrobat — no smart extraction, no templates. Best for users who need a full PDF editor at a lower price than Acrobat.
Online PDF tools for compressing, converting, merging, and splitting PDFs. Good for file-level operations but no web content extraction or templates. Best for users who need occasional PDF manipulation without installing software.
Windows-only desktop application with a one-time purchase option (no subscription). Strong PDF editing features comparable to Acrobat for viewing, annotating, and basic editing. No web capture capabilities — strictly a PDF file editor.
Free — 3 PDFs per month. Pro from $5/month (vs Acrobat's $23/month).
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