Adobe Acrobat Studio review | Macworld

Price When Reviewed

$35 per month or $300 per year

Best Prices Today: Acrobat Studio

A few years ago, if you had told me that in 2025 we’d be chatting with our documents, I would’ve giggled and questioned your sanity. Now it’s the new norm, with companies like OpenAI and Google letting you upload files to their AI platforms and have their chatbots analyze their contents on your behalf. To maintain its dominance in the productivity space, Adobe has launched a similar AI-centric service called Acrobat Studio.

Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Projects and Google’s NotebookLM, Acrobat Studio lets you upload multiple documents to a dedicated digital space. You can then ask the AI chatbot questions about the uploaded information, sparing you from manually reading long walls of text. The subscription also bundles other Adobe services, like Express Premium, the full PDF editing toolbox, 250 generative credits for AI-made media, 100GB of cloud storage, and more.

PDF Spaces is Acrobat Studio’s main exclusive perk. While it’s called PDF Spaces, you can actually upload a wide range of file formats to it, including Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You also get to type or paste notes and import documents via web links or supported cloud storage services. Each space can accommodate up to 100 files at a time, which should be sufficient for most users’ needs.

Once you’re done setting up a space, it becomes an independent knowledge base that takes all of the uploaded files’ contents into account. It will then automatically generate insight cards that include handy pieces of information, like summaries, prominent themes, tables breaking down complex details, etc. Each space also has an integrated AI chatbot to which you can direct your questions.

One thing I appreciate about the AI integration in PDF Spaces is the ability to customize the chatbot. If your uploaded files revolve around legal matters, for example, you can instruct the assistant to view the document through a lawyer’s lens. The insight cards will also refresh and adapt accordingly.

Like similar services, however, the AI chatbot may hallucinate, and the app explicitly warns that you should double-check its results. Fortunately, the chatbot lists citations when answering queries about your documents. If you’re unsure about a certain tidbit, you can quickly jump to the source to verify its accuracy. Adobe also pledges not to train its AI models using the data you upload to its service, making Acrobat Studio more reliable for sensitive matters.

Other neat features include online collaboration and support for taking and editing notes relevant to a certain space.

The Studio tier is sold under Adobe’s Acrobat brand and bundles the PDF editing suite included with the cheaper Pro version. Despite that, the PDF editing tools are seemingly absent from PDF Spaces. If you want to make changes to an uploaded file (PDF or otherwise), you’ll need to download it from the space, load it in Adobe’s separate PDF editor to amend it, save it, re-upload it to the space, and delete the duplicate file. A useful ecosystem integration would’ve been support for direct PDF file edits inside these digital hubs.

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Price and availability

Adobe Acrobat Studio is available as a recurring subscription service, costing $35 per month or $300 as an annual plan. At the time of writing, the pricing webpage specifies that this is a limited-time, early-access offer. As such, the service could cost even more in the coming weeks.

Like other popular Adobe products, you can access Acrobat Studio from desktop, mobile, and the web. If you’re using macOS, I advise you to opt for the website, as the native Acrobat app installs a ton of unnecessary bloatware that will fill up your Mac’s App Library.

For more information on Adobe’s pricing read: Adobe Creative Cloud pricing: How to get the best deal.

Should you invest in Adobe Studio?

Acrobat Studio’s pricing and bundled services don’t make a lot of sense. A welcome move would be offering PDF Spaces as a standalone tool for a cheaper price. It would better compete against ChatGPT Projects and Google NotebookLM, which cost significantly less and serve a comparable purpose. Users who also need Acrobat Pro’s PDF editor, Express Premium’s templates, and the generative credits would get the option to pay extra for the voluntary add-ons.

That’s not to say Adobe Acrobat Studio is an invalid product, however. Those who already pay for Acrobat Pro and Express Premium will appreciate the comprehensive bundle and its exclusive PDF Spaces. The AI-powered feature is highly reliable for extracting data from complex documents, summarizing them, and making them more presentable. It could assist with work assignments, major purchases or investments, university research papers, and much more.