Preview on Mac quietly replaced two paid PDF apps for me

Last updated: October 21, 2026

For most Mac users, Preview is the thing that pops open when you double-click a PDF by accident. It does far more than that. According to MakeUseOf, one Mac user recently ditched a $19.99/month Adobe Acrobat Pro subscription and a $15/month Smallpdf Pro plan after realizing Apple's built-in app could handle signing, form filling, merging, page extraction, compression and redaction without a single penny leaving their wallet.

The catch is that none of this is obvious. The features sit inside menus most people never click. Once you know where they are, Preview becomes a serious everyday tool.

At a glance

• Preview signs PDFs and saves the signature for reuse across documents.
• Since macOS Sonoma, it recognises fillable form fields automatically.
• Merging, splitting and reordering pages is a drag-and-drop operation in the thumbnail sidebar.
• Export includes a Reduce File Size filter that compresses text-only PDFs aggressively.
• A real Redact tool in the markup toolbar actually deletes text instead of blacking it out.

Signing without a scanner

Preview's signing feature is the first thing most people should set up. Open the Markup toolbar (use Cmd + Shift + A if it isn't visible) and look for the signature icon. From there you can draw with the trackpad, scan a piece of paper using the Mac's camera, or use a paired iPhone and a finger. That signature then lives in your account and drops onto any future PDF with one click.

A nice side effect: the same saved signature is available to other macOS apps that share the system's markup layer, so it isn't locked away inside Preview.

Form filling that finally works

Before macOS Sonoma, filling in forms on a Mac meant juggling between Preview and Acrobat. That changed. Preview now spots interactive form fields the same way Acrobat does. Click a box and start typing.

Scanned paper forms without live fields still need the Text tool to drop in a text box. It looks a bit messier than Acrobat when printed, but it ships the document. For everyday forms like a routine W-9, it is more than enough.

Merging, splitting and rearranging pages

Open a PDF in Preview, press Option + Cmd + 2 to bring up the thumbnail sidebar, and drag a second PDF onto it. The new file's pages slot in wherever you release them. Drag thumbnails up or down to reorder. Select a page and hit Delete to remove it.

The reverse move is just as handy: drag selected thumbnails straight onto the desktop and Preview builds a new PDF containing only those pages. Useful at month-end when one invoice needs to come out of a longer statement. Dragging an image file into the sidebar also turns it into a page, which makes light work of bundling scanned receipts into an expense report.

A file size filter that mostly delivers

For pure text scans and emails that just need to clear an attachment size limit, Preview has been doing the job. Head to File, then Export, and the Quartz Filter menu near the bottom. The Reduce File Size option slims image-heavy documents hard and there is no slider to soften it.

The image quality drop can be noticeable. Save the smaller version under a different name so the original bulky file stays around if the result looks rough.

Why the redaction tool matters

A black rectangle drawn with a shape tool looks secure but isn't. Anyone with a viewer can select and copy the underlying text. Preview offers a real Redact option in the markup toolbar that genuinely scrubs the content from the file. Draw it across a word, paragraph or block of text, save, and the original text is unrecoverable.

Preview warns you the first time you save after a redaction, and the warning is genuine. Duplicating the file before redacting is the safe habit because the change can't be undone.

A worked example

Say you get a five-page PDF contract that needs a signature, one line filled in, an account number redacted and the final file shrunk under 2 MB for email. Open it in Preview. Type into the fillable fields directly. Hit the signature button, pick your saved signature and drop it on the signature line. Use the Redact tool on the account number, save under a new name. Open File, Export, choose Reduce File Size from the Quartz Filter menu. Total cost: zero. Total time: under five minutes.

Our analysis

For anyone paying for a PDF subscription out of habit rather than necessity, this is a strong argument to cancel. Adobe Acrobat Pro still wins on power features like advanced OCR, accessibility tagging and complex form authoring. For the common jobs most people actually pay for, signing, merging, splitting, redacting, basic form filling and compressing, Preview covers them at zero cost. Cancelling a $19.99/month Acrobat plan saves roughly $240 a year.

The honest trade-offs are: no OCR for scanned images, no batch processing, limited compression tuning, and a redaction workflow that requires duplicating files first because the operation cannot be undone. Anyone whose work depends on those features still has a reason to pay. Everyone else gets a perfectly capable tool that was already on their Dock, and that matters more than most readers assume.

Who should care

• Freelancers and contractors who sign and send the same PDF types every week.
• Small-business owners paying Acrobat pricing for occasional invoice edits.
• Anyone emailing tax forms or contracts with sensitive account numbers.

Bottom line

Open Preview's menus before you open your wallet. For the everyday PDF jobs most people actually do, the built-in app is enough. Keep a paid subscription only if your work genuinely needs OCR, batch processing or the deeper Acrobat features.