Basalt

I have been using Basalt for my PDF work for a long time now, and at this point I do not see myself going back to anything else. It handles everything I throw at it: merging files, splitting them, compressing, OCR on scanned documents, filling and flattening forms, signing, comparing two versions of a document, and redaction. Eighteen tools, all sitting in one native Mac window, so I am not hunting through menus or opening a second app halfway through a job.

The redaction is the part I trust most. Most tools just draw a black box on top of the text and call it done, which means the words are still sitting in the file, selectable and searchable. Basalt actually removes them from the file, and it lets you review every mark before you apply it. If you handle anything sensitive, that difference matters a lot more than it sounds.

Speed is the other thing. Big documents open in well under a second because the app does not load the whole thing into memory. I have opened files that made other editors sit there spinning.

Then there is privacy. The engine that opens your documents runs as a separate process with no network access at all, enforced by macOS at the code-signature level. No account, no telemetry, no cloud. Your files stay on your machine, and that is a property of how the app is built, not a promise in a policy page.

Price is where the comparison with Adobe gets embarrassing for Adobe. Basalt is $29 once, and the licence covers up to three Macs. Acrobat wants a subscription forever. I paid once, years of use later I have paid nothing more, and I get an app that is faster and simpler than the thing costing me monthly.

It is not bloated, it does not nag me, it does not try to sell me a cloud plan. It opens, it does the job, I close it. If you work with PDFs regularly on a Mac, buy it and stop thinking about it.