Customer Reviews

Nitro PDF Professional

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

Nitro PDF Professional

Acrobat and PDF have been a mainstay in our electornic document workflows for many years.

Since Nuance's PDF Converter and Nitro PDF were both released earlier this year, I have had them both installed within our organisation in order to rate them for prospective roll out through many more seats than what we currently have Acrobat installed on.

The first thing we noticed was that they both used the same base technology that provides the viewing, creation and editing functionality. (As such some of the reviews comparing the two seem somewhat odd!)

There were however differences.

Nuance PDF Converter includes a tool called 'FormTyper' which basically assists you in adding form fields to your PDF documents. The upside is that it can save you some time when building your interactive PDF forms, but you can also use the standard form tools to add form fields (I found this to also be in Nitro).

Nitro PDF includes a comprehensive set of neat new plug-ins that we have found really beneficial to our business. The Optimize Document feature (like the PDF Optimizer in Acrobat) allowed us to dramatically reduce the size of our PDFs, and the Split File feature breaks down some of our massive PDF files into smaller individual files.

Furthermore, Nitro PDF has released a number of updates to their product since we purchased. Some have fixed bugs and others have added functionality. The next to last release led to us having trouble with activation even though we had the product for more than 5 months. Since then they have released a new update which has rectified those problems and added further functionality. Not all updates have been perfect, but we prefer to have software that is continually being improved. There have been no updates to Nuance PDF Converter since we purchased.

FWIW We have just decided to roll out Nitro PDF because the feature set worked better with our day to day requirements for PDF workflow.

I would recommend trialing both products in order to decide which you would use.

Hope this helps.

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Update: Jan 2008

Nitro PDF released a new version (5.3) of the software late last year. I have been testing the new version since. The biggest difference is that Nitro PDF is no longer based on the same technology as it previously was. While the functionality is little changed, there are some major differences:

1. The product is far more stable than both the previous versions of Nitro PDF and Nuance PDF Converter that we had tested. After speaking to the Nitro PDF support team on a regular basis (they were helpful) over the last year or so, it is obvious that the developers have taken note of some of the issues with the previous version. This is a big tick!

2. The interface has changed. Frankly, I am somewhat lukewarm to what they have done. It does use the new Vista ribbon interface though, so some may find its progression a good thing ....

3. This version runs a lot faster on my PC than the previous version. Particularly when creating PDF files which is a good thing.

All in all, it is well worth upgrading to this version. Nitro PDF continues to work hard on improving their software

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Update: May 2010

I have updated this review on the page for the new version 6 Nitro PDF Professional V6

As a small business owner, I am reluctant to spend money on software. I do my best to find a *free* tool as I can't justify the cost. Updating multiple desktops can be expensive! This time around, I tried out at least 6 different PDF products. A few of these products were freeware, or priced in the $30-$40 dollar range. All of these low cost solutions proved to be buggy or have annoying popups. Some others only allowed me to create PDF files (and do nothing else), and that just didn't cut it! Of course, Adobe is out of my price range. I needed something that would let me create PDf files, as well as make page content changes every now and then ...... in the end I chose Nitro PDF Professional after downloading a demo. I think it is good value for money.

Pros

Price - $99 is reasonable to pay for what you get. I can do almost everything - change text, fill out forms, password protect files, bookmarking, sticky notes. No complaints yet.

Support - I have contacted nitro pdf support on a couple of occasions with 'how do I?' type questions, and they really seem to know their stuff. They usually reply within 48 hours, and are generally helpful overall.

Cons

Not compliant with Vista 64 - I spoke to support and a compatible version should be available soon. Of course, this isn't a show stopper, but it will make a few people in my team very happy! :-)

My experience in editors is pretty much limited to things like Word, Emacs, or vi (not necessarily in that order), and when I saw this one and the great reviews I expected it to work something like Word. Well, it does, kinda. Sometimes I can select the stuff I want by dragging over it, and sometimes I can't. It's quirky and has obvious bugs. I've managed to get around all of these by doing my editing in Word and then exporting it to PDF using the Nitro export utility.

I should mention that I haven't tried Adobe's Acrobat editor in a long time, so I can't really compare the two.

So it's not exactly what I was hoping for, but for the price it is worth it because the work-arounds are not heinous, overwhelming, or difficult to figure out. At around a tenth the price of Adobe's editor, I'd buy Nitro again.

We were not able to take advantage of the last version because of various problems such as printing documents over say 3 pages! and frequent computer lock-up because of it. Got no where with tech support either. This version seems to be faster, looks better and creates less problems. One trick getting pdf to work right is to download Adobe as the reader and use Nitro to do the conversion or to create forms. Version 4 was a disappointment. Version 5 seems to meet our needs right now even though some of our Visio drawings don't get converted correctly (especially the hatched portions).

I installed the latest edition of Nitro PDF Pro (5.5.1.3). The program is very nicely designed and follows the Windows Vista type of menu system. The tab feature allows you to easily go back and forth between various open PDF documents. In many ways this program is superior to Adobe Acrobat. In some ways Acrobat is better. Here is my take of differences:

Pluses for Nitro
Interface - Nitro is better and more elegant - Also Toolbar is nicer in Nitro.
Nitro remembers where you last saved a file or opened a file. So if you save more than one file, you don't have to go hunting in Windows Explorer for the proper location. My Adobe (version 6) doesn't do this.
Nitro opens to 100% size. My Acrobat will open to 162% size which means I have to reduce the size to start working on it - Otherwise it takes up too much desktop space.
I like to highlight scanned documents using the rectangle tool. Both programs do this. But Nitro lets you change highlight colors quicker. That's handy.
Nitro opens much faster. As everyone knows, Acrobat takes forever to load.

Pluses for Acrobat
If you reduce the size of a document using Optimize, Acrobat makes a higher quality file using less disk space than Nitro. Nitro has improved a bit in this respect, but it could use a bit more improvement to match Acrobat's Optimize quality.
When I use Court PDF forms, Nitro seems to insist on printing the field box in color - purple or gold. Acrobat lets you print without insisting on the color, so the final printout doesn't look like a form...which is what you want.

Still I give Nitro 5 stars because it is much much cheaper than Acrobat. In fact Nitro often runs massive rebate deals. I picked mine up for $[...] at Fry's with a $[...] rebate, which means it was free. You can't beat that. But even at $[,...] it is still a bargain if you need to work with PDF files a lot.

I use the Nitro PDF Pro to do file conversions to and from PDF and as a form filler. As a converter, it isn't bad. Converting a PDF to a word file is less than perfect, but useable. Creating PDFs is easy, and is a bright spot for me with this program.

As a form filler, this program is crap. Unfortunately, this is my primary need. This program will wait until your information is entered. Then, at some random point, it will scramble your fields around, irrepairably. Attempting to use this program has cost me hours of work.

Furthermore, the program is slow to load, and occasionally hangs.

If you want to try their customer support, you can pay and have access. Yes, you read that right. Support is sold for this terrible software. I personally chose to cut my losses, rather than give a penny more to reward a company for turning out such a poor product. Rather, I will let you all know and be aware before you make a decision. Good luck.

Oh, and when the program is up, your toolbar will not be available. That is irritating.

Bottom line, I want my money back. I don't have time for this. I wish I had a good solution, but I cannot give any recommendation on where else to go!

this nitro pdf tool actually are not bad. It's cheap and has many functions. But after I tried 30 days trial version of acrobat pro 9, I choose acrobat pro 9 although it's 150 bucks more.
1. The most important reason for me to choose adobe is the call out comments. It's my main comment type now, nitro simply don't have that.
2. Second reason is acrobat got more supported by other software makers. I can find the add-on for my dictionary tool so that I can translate by moving mouse over the word while reading pdfs.
3. The new acrobat pro 9 is almost as fast as the acrobat reader, very nice overall performance, reliable. Nitro is as fast as acrobat, but I found nitro sometime is not reliable.
4. I still prefer menu system to the new office 2007 like interface in nitro. I tried to work with it since I am also using office 2007. But every time I am trying to find something, it causes me many many trouble to find stuff. Still hate the ribbon icons.
5. The file size optimize, acrobat 9 is the winner in my tests.
Also acrobat has ocr what works good.

Nitro is much cheaper and usable, maybe I would choose it if it has the call_out comment type. But compare to adobe, the acrobat 9 pro definitely is superior.

The program is polished and performs remarkable well with one MAJOR exception. My primary use of the product is to scan documents for archival and being able to search your archived files is pretty important. Unfortunately this product has not capability of creating searchable or indexed PDF files. In that regard, this product is NOT on par with Adobe Acrobat. I ended up purchasing ABBYY Fine Reader Professional 9.0 for the OCR capability I needed and found it will do not only the OCR portion, but it will do the whole job. Nitro Tech support said they are considering adding OCR in a future version. My advise, wait until their product is fully functional before spending your money.

Excellent product. I have used all of the Adobe suit in my business and I would say that this matches up very well for the price. I had some trouble registering it online which is kinda normal these days, also the fact that it "stamps" pdfs with its brand name can erk sometimes. Overall though, very easy to use and a nice product for the price point.

I have not used PDF software before and this was very simple to use. Now I can create PDFs, change text and use sticky notes and stamps.

The software is pretty cheap for what it does.