PDF Squeezer Alternatives: Deeper on PDF, or Wider on Everything

Four situations where PDF Squeezer is the right $19.99 and we would tell you so directly.

The PDF is the job. If you compress PDFs and essentially nothing else, buy the specialist. Smol gives you five presets. PDF Squeezer gives you a profile editor in which you set image quality and resolution separately, pick a colour profile, decide whether to clip the parts of images the page covers up, and choose which classes of font and annotation survive. Those are different products, and for a legal, HR or archive workflow the second one is the correct tool.

You need the metadata gone as part of compression. This is a concrete gap on our side and we have measured it: no Smol PDF preset strips metadata. Title, Creator, Producer and CreateDate survive tiny, small, medium, large and original alike. We have a separate strip-metadata operation and it works, but it is a second step you have to remember. PDF Squeezer removes document metadata and object-level metadata inside the compression profile itself, in one pass. If you are sending documents outside your organisation, that difference matters.

You want to see what compression cost you. PDF Squeezer’s side-by-side comparison puts the original and the compressed version next to each other so you can check type and figures before you send. We do not have that, and on a document where a chart caption has to stay readable it is the feature that stops a mistake.

You want to try before you pay. PDF Squeezer has a free direct download on witt-software.com next to the Buy Now button, it is in Setapp, and a Mac App Store purchase is refundable through Apple. Smol has no trial, no free tier, and our terms state all sales are final. That is a worse deal for a cautious buyer and there is no way to spin it.

There is also a specific technical case where we are the wrong answer, and we would rather write it down than have you discover it. PDFs generated by ReportLab compress by roughly nothing in Smol. We measured 0.0 to 0.1 percent savings at every preset. The cause is the filter chain: we unwrap /FlateDecode and /DCTDecode image streams, and ReportLab emits /ASCII85Decode followed by /DCTDecode, which we leave untouched. PDFs out of Chrome, ImageMagick, Canva and Keynote compress correctly. If your documents come out of a Python reporting pipeline, use PDF Squeezer, which is built on a different engine and does not have this limitation.

$19.99 on the Mac App Store, with no in-app purchases. The listing read version 4.9 on 26 September 2026, updated two days earlier, seller Daniel Witt, 28.3 MB, Productivity, “Requires macOS 13.0 or later”, English plus 23 other languages. The 4.9 release note leads with “NEW: Added a new profile setting that ensures PDF/A-4 support for long-term document archiving”, alongside faster folder importing and fixes for unresponsiveness on large batches.

On witt-software.com the same app was showing $9.99, struck through from $19.99, under the banner “Limited-time offer: Get 50% off to celebrate the release of PDF Squeezer for Windows!” There is also a free direct DMG download next to the Buy Now button. It is in Setapp too, where the listing reads version 4.9, 97.7 MB, macOS 13.0 or later.

Two things worth flagging so you do not get caught out. First, the vendor’s own specification line still says “Version 4.0” and “macOS 11+”, which is behind the App Store listing. Trust the listing. Second, this is exactly why claims about the app being unmaintained keep appearing: someone reads a marketing page that has not been touched in a while and draws the wrong conclusion. The shipping record says otherwise.

Smol is $29 once for one Mac, or $49 for three licences, with free updates forever. We are more expensive and cover more file types. On PDFs alone, PDF Squeezer is both cheaper and better, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of vendor noise nobody cites.

Considerably, and the gap is structural rather than a matter of polish.

Smol’s PDF compression is five presets: tiny, small, medium, large and original. We have measured what they actually do, and the answer is not what most people assume. They are long-edge pixel caps, not DPI targets: 600, 900, 1,200, 1,800 and 2,400 pixels, at JPEG qualities of roughly 25, 45, 60, 75 and 88. Effective PPI therefore drifts with page geometry, and “medium” measured 200 PPI on one document and 109 on another. What tiny, small, medium and large actually do documents that with numbers. It is a good design for a generalist and a blunt one for an archivist.

PDF Squeezer’s profile editor is a different category of control. Its own page groups the options as Images, Fonts and Annotations, Metadata and Resources, and Advanced. Inside those you can:

• Set image quality and image resolution independently
• Change the colour profile to original, RGB, CMYK or Gray, or reduce colour complexity
• Clip the invisible parts of images that the page covers up, and remove alternate images
• Remove font glyphs that are not used in the file
• Remove standard fonts such as Arial, Courier, Times and Helvetica that devices already have
• Convert embedded fonts to Compact Font Format, and merge compatible font programs
• Remove all annotations except fields and links, or only form fields, or only links
• Remove or change metadata such as author, subject, producer and keywords, and object-level metadata
• Remove redundant resources such as duplicate images, and rebuild content streams
• Remove thumbnails, application data, the document structure tree, article threads and Output Intents

None of those are individually exposed in Smol. If you have ever had a PDF that was enormous because of embedded font programs rather than images, you already know why that list exists.

There is one honest caveat in the other direction, which applies to both apps and to Preview: aggressive structural stripping can break things. Removing the document structure tree removes the markup that assistive technology relies on. Removing form fields removes the form. PDF Squeezer lets you choose, which is both the point and the risk. A preset cannot make that mistake for you because it never offers it.

Everything that is not a PDF, which in practice is most of what lands in a working folder.

Smol’s compression covers images to JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC and GIF, video to MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV with CRF 0 to 63 and nine speed presets, and audio to AAC, M4A, MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG and Opus at 16 to 512 kbps. Conversion adds TIFF, BMP and PDF for images, Office documents, spreadsheets and presentations, tables to CSV, TSV, JSON, NDJSON, Markdown and Numbers, and web fonts to TTF, OTF, WOFF and WOFF2. It reads camera RAW on the way in. None of that exists in a PDF tool and it would be strange if it did.

The PDF-adjacent capability worth naming is rasterising. Smol converts PDF to PNG or JPG, with one real limitation: it renders the first page only. A 15-page PDF yields one image. If you want every page of a single document as separate images, the right recommendation on a Mac is Automator’s Render PDF Pages as Images action, and we will say that rather than pretend otherwise. Where we do win is the other axis: 30 PDFs to 30 JPGs in one job, measured at 2,507 ms. Converting PDF to JPG on Mac covers both routes.

If the whole reason a PDF is going out the door is email, there is a simpler frame than either app’s feature list: getting a PDF under Gmail’s 25 MB limit names the real caps, and the best PDF compressor for Mac ranks the field including the free options, one of which is often enough.

By what you are missing, and the top row is the most likely one.

That Preview row has a catch worth knowing before you use it. Preview’s Reduce File Size filter is a hardcoded plist at /System/Library/Filters/Reduce File Size.qfilter: JPEG quality 0.70, 144 DPI, 2,400 px maximum, with no controls at all. We measured it making a text-only PDF 258.5% larger. It is free and it is sometimes fine, and it is a bad default for documents that are mostly text.

The rest: Acrobat alternatives for Mac, iLovePDF alternatives, CloudConvert alternatives if the job is really conversion rather than compression, and the best PDF compressor for Mac in 2026 for the ranked field. Worth knowing too that Clop optimises PDFs with Ghostscript and can crop them to a device screen, for €15 with a free tier, if compression is all you need and you also live in screenshots.

If the answer is the generalist, Smol is a one-time $29 purchase covering one Mac, with free updates forever. There is no trial, and all sales are final. PDF Squeezer has a free download and a Setapp listing, so if you are only ever going to compress PDFs, try that first and keep your $29.