PDFpen 5 – PDF Editor App Reviews

I have used a lot of PDF mark up apps, and I used PDFpen in the past too. I only went back to it because I bought a Wacom Fineline stylus to get me by until my  Pencil came in and this was the only PDF mark up app that was compatible. Every day in my job I need to mark up PDFs and writing on them is the quickest way for me so I thought even the $20 for the app would be worth it for the 4 weeks it was going to take to get my Pencil it would save me a lot of time, and maybe they fixed PDFpen in the second go around. I am sad to say it is still as unusable as before. The stylus does connect but the app crashes for other unknown reasons, the UI in the app is clunky, nothing about using this app is fluid and just left me frustrated and moving away from using it after an hour of trying to get used to it.

I purchased this on a recommendation from Mac Power Users and was surprised at how clunky it is. I tried it on last time, yesterday, to fill in some human resources forms and finally gave up. The process was slow due to the painful UI, but it also failed to correctly render the form fields or the stuff in them. It wasnt until I loaded the form in another program that I realized how truly broken the PDFpen version was.

The app has great potential but it glitches SO MUCH. It is not an ideal app for editing documents or taking notes (which is what I bought it for). It freezes and/or exits out of my work without saving ALL THE TIME. Very frustrating. If you are thinking about using it for the above reasons, DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY.