Someone sent me a PDF form last week that I needed to fill out and sign. I opened it, tried to type in a field, and remembered — right, you cannot edit PDFs. Adobe wants twenty dollars a month for that privilege.

I refuse to pay a subscription to fill out a form once every few months. Here are the free tools I have found that actually work, in order of how often I use them.

For Filling Out Forms: Your Browser

Most modern browsers — Chrome, Edge, Firefox — can fill out basic PDF form fields without any extension or software. Just open the PDF in the browser, click in the form field, and type. You can also draw a signature with your mouse or trackpad. It is not pretty, but it works. Save the filled PDF and email it back.

If your PDF does not have actual form fields (just blank lines on a scanned page), the browser cannot help. That is when you move to option two.

For Actually Editing Text: LibreOffice Draw

LibreOffice is a free, open-source office suite. Its Draw application can open and edit PDFs natively. You can change text, move images, add new elements, and export back to PDF. It handles fonts reasonably well — not perfectly, but well enough for most documents.

It is a full desktop application, so you have to download and install it. But it is completely free, no account required, and it does 90% of what Adobe Acrobat does for the one-off PDF editing most people actually need.

For Quick Online Edits: ILovePDF and SmallPDF

Both have free tiers that let you merge, split, compress, and do basic edits on PDFs. Do not upload sensitive documents to any free online tool — you do not know where that file is stored or who can see it. But for non-sensitive stuff — combining lecture slides, compressing a PDF that is too large to email — they are fast and convenient.

For Signing: Built-in Tools on Your Phone

On iPhone, the Markup tool in the Files app lets you add a signature to any PDF. On Android, Google Files and Adobe Fill and Sign (the free app, not the subscription) do the same. No printing, no scanning, no buying anything.

Between browser form filling, LibreOffice Draw for actual edits, and phone markup tools for signatures, I have not paid Adobe a single dollar — and I have not needed to.