Adobe Acrobat is the heavyweight in PDF. It's also a subscription (Acrobat Pro is around US$15-23/month), and its online tools upload your files to Adobe's cloud. For a lot of common tasks, you don't need either.
Feature-by-feature
| Feature | Acrobat Online (free / paid) | PDFToolBench |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free with caps / paid | Free |
| Files uploaded | Yes | No |
| Adobe account required | Often | No |
| eSign & Acrobat Reader integration | Yes | No |
| PDF to Word / Excel | Yes | Plain text only |
| True (pixel-baked) redaction | Yes (Pro only) | Yes (free) |
| Bates numbering | Yes (Pro) | Yes (free) |
When you actually need Acrobat
If you depend on Acrobat's PDF-to-Word/Excel fidelity, the Adobe Sign workflow, or the desktop Acrobat suite for accessibility tagging, Acrobat is still in a class of its own.
When PDFToolBench replaces Acrobat online
For the bread-and-butter tasks — merge, split, compress, page operations, watermark, page numbers, OCR, redact, bates, unlock, protect — you're paying Acrobat for features that run perfectly well as JavaScript in your browser. Free, no subscription, no upload.