PDF Expert Alternative for Mac: Editor or Compressor?

There are several cases where PDF Expert is the better choice and $29 spent on Smol would be wasted.

You change the contents of PDFs. Editing text, replacing an image, fixing a link, filling a form, adding a signature or redacting a name is the point of PDF Expert. Smol does none of that. If any of those is a weekly task, PDF Expert is the tool and compression is a bonus you already own.

You work on iPhone and iPad as well. The yearly plan covers iPhone, iPad and Mac under one account. Smol is macOS only.

You need OCR. PDF Expert lists text recognition among its features. Smol does not read the text in a scan; it only makes the file smaller.

You compress one file now and then. If you already pay for PDF Expert, File > Reduce File Size is right there, shows an estimated size before you commit, and lets you save a copy. That is a perfectly good way to shrink one PDF, and buying a second app for it makes no sense.

Yes if you edit PDFs regularly, and no if you opened it only to make a file smaller.

According to its pricing page, the yearly plan is $79.99 billed annually and covers iPhone, iPad and Mac. The lifetime plan is $139.99 as a one-time payment, for the Mac version only, and the same page adds that “additional new features may come at an extra cost.” Both come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. The listed features include editing text, images and links, signing, annotation, OCR, translation and an AI assistant.

For someone who edits and signs contracts all week, that is reasonable money for a polished app. For someone who needs a 40 MB scan under an email limit twice a month, it is a lot to pay for one menu item. That is the person this page is for.

The app itself is current. The Mac App Store lists version 3.13.4, released 28 September, and it requires macOS 12 or later. There is nothing here that suggests neglect, so the reason to leave is price and scope, not quality.

You open the PDF, choose File > Reduce File Size and pick a quality level.

PDF Expert’s own guide to reducing PDF size names Lossless, High and Medium, plus a low-quality option, and says the app shows the approximate reduced size before you save. You can then save over the file, save a copy or share it. The same guide cautions that low quality “may not be suitable for a professional environment or for printing.” We did not test its output, so we make no claim about how small it gets.

Two things the guide does not say. It does not say which plan includes the feature, and it does not describe a way to run it over a folder of files. If you have 80 PDFs to shrink, check that before you rely on it.

Smol’s approach is different. You drop a file or a whole folder, choose Tiny, Small, Medium, Large or Original, and every file gets a copy beside it with a _compressed suffix. The presets are long-edge pixel caps rather than DPI targets, and Original is not lossless, so read what the presets actually do before choosing one for print. For the wider picture, compressing a PDF on Mac, five methods tested and the best PDF compressor for Mac compare the options side by side.

Almost everything that involves changing a PDF’s contents.

Smol does not edit text, sign, fill forms, redact, run OCR, merge or split. It also has no iPhone or iPad app. Its PDF to image conversion covers the first page only. PDF Expert, by its own product page, lists page merging, rotating and reorganizing, an AI enhance feature for scans, and conversion of PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and JPG, none of which we match.

Where Smol goes wider is outside the PDF. The same app compresses images, video and audio, strips metadata without re-encoding, and sits in Finder as a Quick Action. If your week mixes PDFs with photos and screen recordings, that matters more than editing features you never open. Our Acrobat alternatives page covers the same split for the heavier editor, and the PDF Squeezer comparison covers a compressor that goes deeper on PDF alone.

You usually do not move; you split the job. Keep PDF Expert, or drop it, for editing, and give compression to Smol.

Put the finished PDFs in a folder, drag it onto Smol, pick a preset and read the per-file savings. Because the output is a copy by default, your originals stay put until you decide. If compressing would make a file larger, Smol keeps the original. Mac users who want to skip an app entirely can also look at reducing size in Preview, which is free but gives you less control.

Scans and design exports are where PDF compression pays off most; files from some generators barely shrink at all. Legal and filing work has hard limits, and the e-filing guide for law firms and getting a PDF under Gmail’s limit show how that plays out. Smol is a one-time $29 purchase for one Mac. There is no trial and sales are final, so check the list of things it cannot do above before you buy.