We hear this question before almost every purchase, so we’ll answer it without the sales pitch. Both programs are serious tools and both do most of the same things. The differences lie in three areas, and those are usually what decide it.
What both do equally well
It’s only fair to start with where there’s no difference. PDF viewing, commenting and annotation, page organisation, PDF creation, digital signatures, redaction, basic text recognition and conversion – all of these are available in both programs. If that’s all you need, choose based on price and familiarity.
Difference one: document comparison
This is FineReader’s greatest strength and the most common reason why lawyers buy it from us.
FineReader lets you compare two versions of a document even when they are in different formats – for example, a Word file against a scanned, signed PDF. The program highlights only meaningful differences, ignoring changes in formatting or line breaks. The result can be saved as a PDF with comments, as a Word document with Track Changes enabled, or as a separate table of differences.
A real-life case: you’ve been sent a scan of a signed contract, you have your own Word version and you want to know whether anything has been changed. Not every program can compare a scan with a text document.
Important: comparison is available only in the Corporate edition for Windows. The Standard and Mac editions don’t have it.
Difference two: text recognition and editing
Recognition is ABBYY’s core expertise – the company has been doing it since 1989. In practice, this shows in three places:
- OCR Editor. You can manually adjust the recognition areas – mark where a table, a column or a picture is. With complex documents, this is the difference between a tidy result and a jumble.
- Photo correction. Removing the background and correcting perspective before recognition – for documents photographed with a phone, this is almost everything.
- Paragraph-level text editing. When you edit text in a PDF, the paragraph reflows across the whole page instead of falling apart after the first word you insert.
198 languages are recognised, and they can be combined within a single document – useful when a text mixes, say, Lithuanian and English.
Difference three: licensing and price
This difference isn’t technical but relates to licensing, which often matters more to organisations than individual features.
The software is installed locally. FineReader runs on your computer and doesn’t need to send anything to the cloud. For organisations that process personal data, this is often a fundamental requirement.
Concurrent licences. You can install the program on every computer and pay only for as many licences as there are people working at the same time. If scanning is done in shifts or not everyone needs the program every day, the savings are considerable. Adobe doesn’t offer this type of licence.
Subscriptions for 1 or 3 years and progressive volume discounts. More on this in the section on multiple licences.
Where Adobe leads
This needs saying too. Acrobat is stronger for complex interactive forms with JavaScript logic. If your work involves building complex calculating forms, that’s an argument in Adobe’s favour.
The second thing is the environment. If the whole organisation already works within the Adobe ecosystem and its processes are built around it, switching costs more than just the difference in licence prices.
How to decide in ten minutes
Don’t argue over feature lists – take one of your real documents. That same poor scan, that same contract full of tables. The trial version is free and runs for 7 days with all Corporate features, including comparison. In a single evening you’ll learn more than from any comparison article, this one included.
If you’ve decided on FineReader: FineReader PDF Standard, FineReader PDF Corporate and FineReader PDF for Mac licences with a VAT invoice are available in our shop.
This article is based on information published by the manufacturers. Adobe and Acrobat are trademarks of Adobe Inc.; ABBYY and FineReader are trademarks of the ABBYY group of companies.