No other productivity app quite rivals ABBYY FineReader's combination of document comparison, optical character recognition (OCR), and PDF editing features, let alone puts them into as slick an interface. Its OCR tools are the most accurate we've tested, and we appreciate how its editing interface helps streamline the manual correction process that working with old or damaged documents often requires. The app also automatically converts and processes files in a folder you specify and provides unique tools for fixing any low-quality images you encounter. We wish the app made it easier to combine files, but ABBYY FineReader still handily earns our Editors' Choice award, thanks to its extensive capabilities and superb user experience.

Pricing and Subscription Plans

ABBYY FineReader is available in two versions for Windows. The Standard version ($99 per year) has all the essential PDF editing tools, while the Corporate version I tested ($165 per year) adds automated conversion (up to 5,000 pages per month) and document comparison features. A less-capable version for macOS goes for $69 per year. You get just one license per subscription, and perpetual licenses are no longer available.

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For comparison, Adobe Acrobat Standard ($155.88 per year) and Acrobat Pro ($239.88 per year) cost significantly more than their FineReader counterparts. Adobe Acrobat Pro benefits from a close integration with Adobe's cloud apps and services, but it doesn't match FineReader’s OCR features. Nitro PDF Pro, another high-end PDF app, costs $180 per year. Full-featured, subscription-based versions of Acrobat and Nitro PDF are available for both macOS and Windows, though the perpetual license version of Nitro PDF ($250) is Windows-only.

If you are specifically looking for OCR tools, FineReader's closest rival is Kofax OmniPage. A perpetual license for the Standard version costs $149, while the $499 Ultimate version adds advanced workflow features and superior OCR for camera images. Both are Windows-only apps. 

ABBYY's version of FineReader for iOS (not available on Android) has a picture scanning feature that costs $20.99 per year; it includes high-quality OCR for camera photos and the option to transfer documents to your computer via Google Drive for easier editing. On mobile, you should also consider other scanning apps, such as Adobe Scan and Microsoft Lens. An iOS version of Nitro PDF is also available.

Interface and Ease of Use

FineReader's interface is minimalist and straightforward, but you can drill down to an exceptionally rich set of tools and options. The main sidebar has five tabs that open spacious menus: Open, Scan, Compare, Recent, and Mobile Application.

The Open tab lets you open existing PDF files or use FineReader’s OCR Editor. This menu also has shortcuts for converting other forms to PDFs and converting PDFs to Excel, Word, and other formats. The Scan section allows you to create a PDF from a scanner or scan a document into the app’s OCR Editor. Alternatively, you can scan to Excel, Word, or another format. The Compare tab lets you compare two versions of the same document or any combination of PDF and text documents. You can configure the software to find or ignore punctuation differences or differences of just one letter. Finally, the Recent tab opens a list of recent documents, while the Mobile Application one populates a list of documents you created via the mobile app (once you set up that integration).

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FineReader gives you the tools to convert individual PDF or image files to another format or combine a number of PDF and image files into a single document. In the first case, you can specify how closely the output file should be to the original. Options among the four available range from an exact reproduction (this creates difficult-to-manage text boxes in Word) to unformatted text. Adobe Acrobat Pro, by contrast, gives you options only to retain the original page layout or convert to flowing, fully editable text.

Editing Features

FineReader offers the same basic PDF editing tools as Adobe Acrobat, Nitro Pro, and other premium PDF apps. You can create forms, digitally sign documents, redact or erase pictures or text, and more. You can also add watermarks and apply Bates numbering to PDFs that encompass multiple documents with separate page numbers.

A new Organize Pages view conveniently lets you delete blank pages with a single click and includes a cropping tool that works on all pages simultaneously or individually. The latter outshines the cropping tools in rival apps by letting you choose a single crop size for the entire document but position the cropping frame separately, so that all pages end up the same size and with centered text. FineReader doesn't let you choose different crop locations for even- and odd-numbered pages like Adobe Acrobat, but its cropping tool is still easier to manage because it lets you view thumbnail images of all pages at the same time.

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I especially like FineReader's powerful Hot Folder feature, which lets you schedule automated processing of files you add to a folder on your system or from an FTP server. You can create complex series of steps, such as performing OCR, removing blank pages, and more. The app can even delete the original files that it uses to create the PDFs. Adobe’s similar feature isn’t in Acrobat but rather in the separate Acrobat Distiller app. It doesn't match ABBYY’s flexibility or ease of use.

FineReader surprisingly still lacks the full-text, multi-file indexing feature in Adobe Acrobat and Tungsten Power PDF, which can dramatically speed up text searches. That said, it does display a list of all search results in a sidebar panel so you can easily find what you're looking for. Acrobat shows only one search hit at a time unless you know enough to click on a tool icon and open a separate Full Search panel that lists all search hits in one or more files. This component isn't convenient to access, but the option to search across multiple files is handy.

Combining files in FineReader is less intuitive than it should be. You must first open a single PDF to view its thumbnail images and then drag other PDFs into the same window. It took me a while to figure this out. Acrobat makes it easy to combine multiple files into a single PDF by dragging them into an empty window; it also puts this option in its main menu.

OCR Features

I use FineReader's superb OCR Editor tool more than any other when I want to extract text from scanned images of books and magazines because it produces the most accurate results. When you first open a PDF or image file in the editor, it performs OCR and displays the file in a multi-panel interface. Here, you get a sidebar on the left with thumbnails of each page, a large pane that shows the current page, another large pane with the text the app has extracted, and a close-up panel with a large-scale image of the part of the page you are currently working on at the bottom. You can adjust the app's initial OCR focus by deselecting areas with images, markings, or text. If the app mistakenly interprets some text as a table, or the reverse, you can correct it with a couple of mouse clicks, too.

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If you're dealing with low-quality images, such as Xeroxes of printed pages, you can open the app's Image Editor, a special-purpose photo editor that enhances scans. You can change brightness and contrast levels, correct trapezoidal distortion, split an image into separate pages, erase stray marks and spots, straighten text lines, remove markings made with color inks, and more. The app lets you apply these fixes to one page at a time or the entire document. Competitors don't offer anything similar.

The other aspect that stands out about FineReader’s OCR Editor is its Verification window. One by one, this displays every text string that the OCR engine isn't certain is correct and lets you either confirm or correct the text. This window is especially effective because you can make corrections entirely from your keyboard and fly through hundreds of corrections with minimal effort. OmniPage has a similar verification window, but its nonintuitive design makes it far harder to correct mistakes and avoid more errors. For example, it uses a numbered list for suggested alternatives, so you can never be confident that you're implementing a fix rather than simply typing a number into your text.

FineReader's screen capture utility, called ABBYY Screenshot Reader, remains the most effective and flexible way to extract text from anything visible in Windows. Available from the system tray, it lets you copy images, tables, or text to the clipboard, an email, or an Excel or Word file. The Text Extractor tool within the Microsoft PowerToys utility is a no-cost alternative. However, it formats captured text only as a table or text and can copy it to the clipboard.

Document Comparisons

Over the years, I've used FineReader to get editable text out of faint Xerox copies of old magazines and newspapers, as well as scanned books and documents. This is sometimes soul-crushing labor, but FineReader makes it far easier than it would be otherwise. Its document comparison tool has saved me many hours of tedious labor and helped me catch errors I would never have noticed without it.

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Unlike the document comparison feature in Microsoft Word, which works only with Word documents, FineReader lets you compare files in two different formats—for example, PDF and Word. It also provides a keyboard-friendly interface for navigating from one difference to the next. Word's document comparison interface is also clumsy and confusing compared with FineReader's. The latter clearly shows variations between documents with effective color coding. I still find it impressive that FineReader can display a scanned image in one pane, a formatted Word document in another, and an accurate list of the differences in a third one.