Foxit PDF Compressor vs PDF Candy

Foxit PDF Compressor reduces PDF size through a free online tool or desktop software. The online workflow is to upload a PDF, start compression, and download the smaller file; it accepts one file at a time up to 150 MB, without requiring an account. Foxit says online compression preserves text clarity, images, and formatting, while OCR-friendly compression can shrink scanned or image-heavy documents and keep scanned text readable. It says files are encrypted in transit and deleted from its servers after processing. For offline work, Foxit PDF Editor provides compression, batch processing, and optimization settings with multiple levels. The product page describes using compressed PDFs with SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Microsoft Teams. PDF Editor costs $129.99 a year, PDF Editor+ costs $159.99 a year, and the perpetual PDF Editor 14 license costs $209.99 as a one-time purchase. PDF Editor+ includes a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. Foxit was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Fremont, California.

PDF Candy is a PDF toolkit for editing, converting, merging, splitting, compressing, signing, protecting and managing documents. Its tools include text editing, annotations and OCR, while AI features can summarize, chat with and translate PDF documents. Users can import files from Google Drive or Dropbox and save updated versions back to cloud storage. PDF Candy Desktop is a Windows download with 35 tools that can operate offline; the company lists 98 PDF tools and 19 languages. Access is listed for web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. The free plan has page and hourly restrictions, limited file size, no batch processing and a desktop operations limit. Students and teachers can get one year of PDF Candy PRO online at no cost, with no hourly limits and uploads up to 500 MB. PDF Candy says files are deleted from its servers within two hours after processing. The free plan is available, with paid access from $6/mo.