Adobe Acrobat is the Swiss Army knife of PDF tools -- editing, signing, forms, OCR, redaction, and yes, web-to-PDF conversion. But if web-to-PDF is your main need, Acrobat is expensive overkill. Pretty PDF is purpose-built for one thing: turning web content into professional PDFs. It does that one thing better, faster, and at a fraction of the cost.
Free -- 3 PDFs per month. Pro from $5/month.
How Adobe Acrobat and Pretty PDF stack up across every capability that matters for web-to-PDF conversion.
| Feature | Adobe Acrobat | Pretty PDF |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $23/mo (Acrobat Pro) | $5/mo (Pretty PDF Pro) |
| Focus | General PDF editing + creation | Web-to-PDF specialist |
| Content extraction | Basic -- no smart extraction | Advanced -- automatic ad/clutter removal |
| Templates | None for web-to-PDF | 5 professional templates |
| Site-specific parsing | None | 8 platforms with dedicated parsers |
| Chrome extension | Yes but limited | Purpose-built with DOM preprocessing |
| Cloud library | Yes -- broad document management | Yes -- focused on web-saved PDFs |
| PDF editing | Full editor | Not included -- different tool |
| Forms & signatures | Yes | Not included |
| OCR | Yes | Not included |
Acrobat's web-to-PDF captures the full page like Ctrl+P. No smart extraction, no ad removal, no article isolation. Pretty PDF's extraction engine identifies the main content and strips everything else. A cluttered news article that Acrobat converts into an 8-page mess becomes a clean 3-page document with Pretty PDF.
Acrobat gives you one look for web captures -- whatever the page happens to look like. Pretty PDF offers 5 professional templates -- Clean, Minimal, Corporate, Academic, and Dark -- each with embedded fonts (Fraunces headings, Instrument Sans body) and proper typography designed for readable documents.
Acrobat has no special handling for GitHub, Medium, Stack Overflow, or any other platform. Pretty PDF has dedicated parsers for 8 platforms that understand each site's unique HTML structure. A GitHub README, a Stack Overflow answer, or a Medium article is parsed with purpose-built logic that produces dramatically better output than a generic page capture.
$5/mo vs $23/mo. If web-to-PDF is your primary use case, that's $216/year saved. Pretty PDF's free tier even gives you 3 PDFs per month at no cost -- no credit card required. Acrobat has no free tier for its desktop application.
Acrobat is the right choice when you need capabilities beyond web-to-PDF conversion. It excels at tasks Pretty PDF was never designed to handle:
Pretty PDF doesn't do any of these things. It's a web-to-PDF tool, not a PDF editor. If your workflow revolves around editing, signing, and managing existing PDF documents, Acrobat is the right tool.
If you edit, sign, and manipulate PDFs as your primary workflow and occasionally capture web content -- use Acrobat. Its web-to-PDF feature is basic, but it's bundled with a comprehensive PDF editing suite that justifies the $23/month price if you use those features daily.
If you primarily save web content as PDFs and want the cleanest possible output -- use Pretty PDF. It does one thing and does it better than Acrobat: intelligent content extraction, professional templates, site-specific parsing, and a purpose-built Chrome extension. At $5/month, it costs a fraction of what Acrobat charges.
Many users use both: Pretty PDF for web capture, Acrobat for document editing. The two tools complement each other because they solve fundamentally different problems. Pretty PDF turns web pages into clean PDFs. Acrobat edits, signs, and manages those PDFs after they exist.
Get clean, professionally styled PDFs from any webpage. Purpose-built, lighter, and cheaper than Acrobat for web-to-PDF conversion.
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