Highlights vs Komodo PDF
Highlights
highlightsapp.netKomodo PDF
komodopdf.comSide by side
| Figure | Highlights | Komodo PDF |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $2.50/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · PDF Readers | 8.3 (#6) | 8.0 (#13) |
| Privacy | The maker says it does not require personal information to use the app, stores the optional annotation username locally and collects no payment or licensing information. | The maker says Komodo has no backend, sends no telemetry, and does not upload documents to Komodo; remote chat sends retrieved document passages to the configured provider. |
| Support | For crash issues, the FAQ asks users to email [email protected] with details and helpful crash reports, screenshots or screen recordings. | The maker links to a contributing guide and a bug-report page on GitHub. |
Plans
In their own words
Highlights
Highlights is a PDF reader for research that turns PDF annotations into notes, available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Its free plan supports reading and annotating PDFs, merging annotations, editing PDF metadata, and Handoff. Notes can be exported as Markdown, TextBundle, HTML, WebArchive, or PDF, or sent directly to supported apps including Evernote, DEVONthink, Ulysses, Bear, and Keep It. For scientific articles, Highlights can find DOIs and retrieve metadata; it can link to a PDF on the device if the citation has already been read. Built-in multilingual OCR extracts text from PDFs without searchable text, with processing done on device. Smart Copy outputs copied images as PNG, tables as CSV, and citations as BibTeX. PDFs can be stored on device, in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or another sync service, while annotations use standard PDF annotations. On macOS it integrates with Bookends and Papers. The free plan is available alongside Pro at $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year. The maker describes the app as intended for students and researchers.
Komodo PDF
Komodo PDF is a free, GPLv3 open-source PDF reader for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Its local-first reader supports continuous scrolling, zoom, fit-width and fit-page views, document outlines, and text selection. An AI panel answers questions using passages indexed in a local vector store. Clicking a citation takes you to the cited passage and highlights it, while a per-page badge marks pages without a text layer, such as scanned images. If the document cannot answer, the assistant can use general knowledge and indicate that fallback. Chat works with OpenAI-compatible providers using your own API key and with local chat endpoints. The maker says Komodo has no backend, sends no telemetry, and does not upload documents to Komodo; remote chat sends retrieved passages to the configured provider. With local ONNX embeddings and a local chat endpoint, documents are said to remain on the laptop. API keys use the operating-system keyring with an encrypted disk fallback. Windows downloads include EXE, MSI, and portable ZIP files, with published SHA-256 checksums. Version 0.1.1 is displayed.