# Page 5 | ABBYY FineReader PDF Reviews 2026. Verified Reviews, Pros & Cons | Capterra > Page 5 - Is ABBYY FineReader PDF the right PDF Editor solution for you? Explore 428 verified user reviews from people in industries like yours to make a confident choice. Source: https://www.capterra.com/p/65868/ABBYY-FineReader/reviews --- ABBYY FineReader PDF 4.7 (428) [View alternatives](https://www.capterra.com/p/65868/ABBYY-FineReader/alternatives/) Provider data verified by our Software Research team, and reviews moderated by our Reviews Verification team. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/our-story/) * * * Last updated March 13th, 2026 # Page 5 - Reviews of ABBYY FineReader PDF ## Showing most helpful reviews Showing 101-125 of 428 Reviews Sort by: Most Helpful Rating Company Size Reviewer's Role Length of Use Frequency of Use AM Angele M. HR Consultant Human Resources Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Fantastic product" December 23, 2022 5.0 Fantastic! I was reluctant to switch but now I recommend it to everyone. Pros Great value for the money. It does everything I need and more. Streamlined and easy to use Cons There is a slight delay when you select options that took getting used to, but it doesn’t impact useability Alternatives considered [Adobe Creative Cloud](https://www.capterra.com/p/48969/Adobe-Creative-Cloud/) Reason for choosing ABBYY FineReader PDF Price for equal functionality Switched from [Adobe Creative Cloud](https://www.capterra.com/p/48969/Adobe-Creative-Cloud/) Price Review Source GT Graham T. Aircraft Engine specialist Airlines/Aviation Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Most versatile pdf to Excel conversions available" May 22, 2024 5.0 Have used ABBY exclusively to do document conversions for over 11 years now. No other app Including Acrobat is as good as this one. Pros The MAIN reason I use ABBY Finereader is to convert multi-page pdf invoices to Excell so that they can be dissected and analyzed. I have tried all other pdf to Excel converters and they all botch them up completely with misaligned rows and columns, making the task more excruciating. ABBY is the ONLY app available that can quickly adjust rows and columns to an exact OCR match. Invaluable! Cons Learning curve to use all the features can be a bit tedious but not overwhelming. Review Source LN Louwrens N. Senior IT Engineer Financial Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "ABBYY FineReader Converts and Edits easily and without issues." February 8, 2023 5.0 We deployed the ABBYY Finereader sofware in our offices and it really does an awesome job at editing and converting PDFs to Office documents. The OCR function works really well and overall this tool makes our daily lives so much easier. Pros The overall user interface is easy to understand and simple to work with.The OCR capability really is what we use the most as a lot of our business users need to edit PDF documents all the time. Cons We could not find anything we dislike with ABBYY Finereader. Reason for choosing ABBYY FineReader PDF ABBYY FineReader came in less expensive that some of their competitors, and it passed our stringent security checks. Review Source JL Jan L. \---- Writing and Editing Used the software for: 2+ years ### "my review" June 23, 2023 4.0 They have been working with the program for several years and it is great. Pros When it comes to the ABBYY FineReader PDF program, I like converting text from PDF to Word the most ... Cons I don't even know that. Possible price. Otherwise, I have been using the program for a long time and I am satisfied. Reason for choosing ABBYY FineReader PDF In my experience ABBYY FineReader PDF is the best although a bit expensive. Review Source EEV Enrique E V. Graduate student researcher Higher Education Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Great software for OCR!" May 22, 2024 5.0 Pros Software is easy to use and the pdf conversion and image recognition is pretty great. I compared it versus a few python algorithms and ABBYY performed better and with the advantage of creating a searchable file. Cons The Mac functionality is pretty basic. It would need to have more features. Conversion from pdf to txt is good, but it could be better: some documents that used special symbols weren’t properly converted for example. This is important when using the software with documents in languages other than English. Review Source Rishi B. Business Owner Retail Used the software for: 1-2 years ### " Typing from scratch to only editing" December 26, 2018 5.0 We have replaced the habit of typing from scratch to only editing with an initial copy accurate close to 99 percent. Pros When it comes to printed texts of which we have no soft copy, earlier the only way to make it digital was typing (not talking about image formats like jpg). With ABBYY FineReader, I have reduced the amount of typing by almost 99 percent. Often, customers come to us with printed papers asking for reproducing the same with a bit of editing. We now just scan the copy, upload to ABBYY FineReader, and get the final output in MS Word format. I wish I should have known about this technology much earlier. Cons The software is constantly improving and there is always a room for improvement in deciphering text more accurately when the input given not so clear. Review Source MS Mari S. MD Accounting Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "A nightmare to set up" December 15, 2023 2.0 A nightmare to set up OCR not very accurate Scanning is good Pros Product is good. Purchase and set up a complete nightmare. Getting the serial number to activate required legal threats. Was sold with a free mobile version which Eventually i got a link for but would not install. I only got help when i raised a complaint with paypal. Cons Setup and administration. Their payment and processing system seems to be completely independant of issuing license numbers Switched from [Slack](https://www.capterra.com/p/135003/Slack/) Cost considerations and supposed ease of use OCR theoretically good but pretty poor Review Source AV Alex V. Investigator - data interrogation Accounting Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Most versatile OCR software" August 27, 2019 5.0 I use Abby for a number of purposes, however where it is most useful to me is to convert financial data for analysis in Microsoft Excel for further analysis. Pros One of the most useful aspects of Abbyy Finereader, especially when compared to other OCR software is the level of control offered to the user. This enables poor quality scans as an example to be cleaned up and optimized for recognition. It is easy to edit pages collectively or individually to compensate for distortions and even deal with water marks and poor quality images. The accuracy is phenomenal and ability to use dictionaries or customize your own increases recognition capacity. Abbyy Fine Reader has greatly improved over the years and i expect great things from them in the future as technology evolves. Cons I do have a wish list: A setting to have ability to ignore pages during recognition. The ability to ignore a column within a table. A way to verify text in a chosen sequence such as down then up and or select areas to ignore. Review Source YS Yiannakis S. TRANSLATOR Translation and Localization Used the software for: 2+ years ### "ABBYY Converting PDF texts into Word" June 23, 2023 4.0 It provides an enormous help in by job. Pros When I have to translate documents from PDF , I use ABBYY to convert them into Word and then use one of the specialized machine translation systems. . In this way I have a first draft of the translation I have to do and make all the necessary corrections. I use ABBYY mainly in turning texts in English or in Greek into world. This saves me a lot of time as I don't have to type thousands of words, but only make all the necessary corrections. Cons I did not encounter any difficulties in using the ABBYY FineReader Review Source GR Gregory R. Attorney Law Practice Used the software for: 2+ years ### "OCR: Should be able to select an area to apply "Levels" in "Edit Image."" May 22, 2024 4.0 Best of the best. Pros Accuracy. Features. Ease of use. Cons OCR: Can't select an area to apply "Levels" in "Edit Image." Switched from [OmniPage Ultimate](https://www.capterra.com/p/36524/OmniPage-Ultimate/) Additional features. Review Source DA Deborah A. Parish Administrator Religious Institutions Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Save space in the filing cabinet" November 9, 2021 5.0 Pros That I was able to scan documents on the church copier as a PDF file and convert them all to searchable PDFs. Cons That the handwriting recognition isn't as sharp as it used to be. Reason for choosing ABBYY FineReader PDF It came with the scanner I first purchased and worked well. Review Source Response from ABBYY Software House November 30, 2021 Dear User, thank you for sharing your feedback and for the great review. We are sorry to hear about your issues with handwriting recognition and offer you to contact our support team https://support.abbyy.com/hc/en-us/requests/new in case you face more issues since in general, this should not be the case. Jonathan A. Attorney Law Practice Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "My experience with ABBYY FineReader PDF" August 18, 2021 3.0 Okay experience, the OCR algorithm of the software needs work, but it's an overall decent product. Does what it's supposed to most of the time. Pros I liked the UI and UX of the software, it's definitely straight forward and once you install it, you can use it immediately with the easy how to use steps and indicators through out the software. A lot of times, when I am doing legal research, I had access to number of PDF books, articles etc... and I would want to get a excerpt of the book, article or whatever and I would use FineReader to convert it from PDF to plain text, hence that was the feature that really drew me to FineReader. Cons The OCR feature was okay, a lot of times it would incorrectly convert the PDF to text, all sorts of things like special characters would appear, the formatting would be all over the place... and it meant i had to spend some time manually editing it. Review Source VC Victoria C. Translator Writing and Editing Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Daily user of ABBYY FineReader PDF" November 15, 2021 5.0 I am able to translate documents much faster because of ABBYY FineReader PDF. Because I can make the text editable using the OCR editor, I am able to add the output document to a translation tool and utilize memory and previous translations to work more efficiently. Pros The OCR editor is really important to my business. The output is very clean, and I like that the OCR editor gives so many options to help customize and improve the output so that I can use the text in a translation tool. I also really like how easy it is to edit the PDF and digitally sign documents. Cons I work with a lot of poor scans or old documents, and I think the OCR editor could be improved in reading documents that have some fuzziness or imperfections. Review Source Response from ABBYY Software House November 30, 2021 Thank you for sharing your feedback and for the great review. We are happy to hear about your positive experience. Subscribe to our blog for tips, trends, and use cases to boost your document productivity even more! https://pdf.abbyy.com/blog/ RL Robert L. Retired physician Medical Practice Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Excellent for translations and improved accuracy over the previous versions." May 26, 2022 5.0 This was a tremendous help in translating a document written in a German typeface from the 1800s. I trained the software to read this archaic font and then was able to copy and paste the text of the document into an on line translator to find what it said. I am a long time user of Fine Reader 8 and the recent updates of the program had not been any more accurate than version 8 until this one, Version 15. I bought the newest version to obtain improved accuracy of character recognition and document formatting. Pros Its accuracy; it is an improvement over the previous version. I owned version 8 and would periodically try newer versions as they were offered, but the accuracy wasn't any better than that of version 8 despite what the advertising said. Version 15 was noticeably more accurate for the types of documents I OCR. I like that you can buy it as an owned program and not as a subscription. There's a music OCR program I like, but because it's a subscription, I won't buy it. I like having quick access to diacritical marks and symbols in this version. Cons I had been a user of version 8 for many years. The layout of the program was different and I still sometimes struggle to find a function that I want to do. I dislike having to double click on a page image on the left side to get it to display in the OCR windows. In version 8 I just had to click on the image once to change pages. I miss having the text name of functions written below icons. Verification should be just to the right of Recognize rather than on the far right. The flow is currently wrong: it should be recognize, verify, save. Review Source GA Gary A. VP Telecommunications Used the software for: 2+ years ### "ABBYY FineReader Provides Full Access And Control" May 24, 2022 5.0 Pros The ability to easily convert Word Process, Spreadsheet, and other documents into PDF format for easy transmission to others. Cons You used to be able to buy a license that did not require annual renewals. That has now changed. Review Source ZW Zyad W. Technical IT Support Construction Used the software for: 2+ years ### "OCR that supports all languages" December 10, 2023 5.0 I use ABBYY FineReader PDF to convert scanned PDFs to Excel or Word so that they can be edited, I have been using ABBYY FineReader PDF for more than 4 years and I like this application as it provided a great OCR feature. Pros ABBYY FineReader PDF has the best and most accurate OCR tool in the world. The ABBYY FineReader PDF OCR tool supports all languages, especially the most complicated ones like Arabic language. Also, the OCR gives high quality and accurate results and can be converted to Excel, Word, and text. Cons ABBYY FineReader PDF is not the best PDF editor or viewer, the text editing is somehow more complicated than other PDF editor applications. I wish they could upgrade and enhance PDF editing features to become the most integrated PDF software. Review Source EW Ernest W. editor Publishing Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Better than Adobe" November 9, 2021 5.0 as good, better in some cases, as Adobe at a reasonable cost. Pros it is very easy to use. It is also full of useful features which are much simpler to use than Adobe. I cannot think of one thing that Adobe can do better, although i do not use some of the more collaborative features. It is stable, does a great job of creating and editing PDF and does the same thing Adobe does for a lot less money. Cons I wish there was something to say here, but i really have no issue or problems with what i use this for Switched from [Adobe Creative Cloud](https://www.capterra.com/p/48969/Adobe-Creative-Cloud/) too many technical issues with Adobe Review Source Response from ABBYY Software House November 30, 2021 Thank you for sharing your feedback and for the great review. We are happy to hear about your positive experience. Subscribe to our blog for tips, trends, and use cases to boost your document productivity even more! https://pdf.abbyy.com/blog/ VR Verified Reviewer Accountant Accounting Used the software for: 2+ years ### "pdf" May 24, 2022 5.0 excellent Pros editing and adding watermarks is very good Cons no dislikes. works great for me every time Review Source WJ Werner J. Lehrer Education Management Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Jederzeit und Überall" June 23, 2023 5.0 Pros das unkomplizierte Handling bei OCR und PDF Cons Über viele Jahre der Nutzung habe ich keinerlei Nachteile vonABBYY Finreader feststellen können!!! Review Source Meale Y. marketer Business Supplies and Equipment Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "le pdf editor software" December 17, 2022 5.0 it is a very good to convert easily documents and to edit them Pros i have used ABBYY finereader PDF software to convert my word document into pdf documents Cons the electronic signature is not very perfect. they can perform it Review Source EO Eugene O. Business Development Manager Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "A convenient program for scanning and recognizing documents" August 10, 2018 5.0 Pros Earlier I had to work a lot with the documents of our company and client contracts. For example, the customer brought a paper version of the contract, I scanned it, recognized it, rules of error, etc. And all this happened with the help of Fine Reader professional versions. I also like that you can translate and save in various formats. For example, text in the format djwu or pdf, and even not copied, after carrying out the text through this program you can save the text in Word and use it anywhere and anyhow. In general, this is a simple and convenient program, albeit not cheap. Cons I happened that some versions of ABBYY Fine Reader did not recognize the printer and I had to reinstall the program or run to a colleague and ask him to print the necessary document processed in the application. In doing so, I had a standard Canon printer, so there should not be any problems. Review Source DC David C. Translator Translation and Localization Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Strengths and Weaknesses of OCR features" May 24, 2022 4.0 Main use is converting PDFs of documents sent to us for translation into Word, so they can be translated using Trados software. I'm using an older version of Trados, which can't handle .docx documents, so it's very helpful that ABBYY FineReader converts directly to .doc format. Pros My go-to OCR software. Does an excellent job of converting both English and foreign-language text to Word format. Pretty decent at converting PDF docs that have less than stellar resolution into correct text. Very pleased that it can covert both to .doc as well as .docx format. Cons Generally has difficulty dealing with images and graphics. Often converts tabbed text to text boxes, which can only be effectively further used in Word by copying and pasting the contents into blank pages and re-integrating them into the document. If it converted tabbed text to tables, it would be far easier to use the result. Review Source pL philippe L. association Civic & Social Organization Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "x" August 31, 2023 1.0 impossible à faire fonctionner le iscanner.Ne scanne rien....notice pas détailléela notice d' emploi n'est pas suffisamment détaillée .Il aurait été souhaitable d'avoir des images associées à la démarche pour scanner des documents;on parle d'un bouton numériser (????) est ce le même que le bouton pour allumer le scannersi oui cs on appuie plus de 2 secondes il s'éteint comment faire alors pour scanner ?? Pros aucune ca ne fonctionne pasla notice d' emploi n'est pas suffisamment détaillée .Il aurait été souhaitable d'avoir des images associées à la démarche pour scanner des documents;on parle d'un bouton numériser (????) est ce le même que le bouton pour allumer le scannersi oui cs on appuie plus de 2 secondes il s'éteint comment faire alors pour scanner ?? Cons la notice d' emploi n'est pas suffisamment détaillée .Il aurait été souhaitable d'avoir des images associées à la démarche pour scanner des documents;on parle d'un bouton numériser (????) est ce le même que le bouton pour allumer le scannersi oui cs on appuie plus de 2 secondes il s'éteint comment faire alors pour scanner ?? Review Source SZ Sinisa Z. Technology Manager Translation and Localization Used the software for: 2+ years ### "The OCR Standard" July 31, 2023 5.0 Pros Mostly for converting PDFs when multiple files need to be processed at once, as it allows you to upload multiple at a time. It also gives the option to convert all of them into a single Word file or to convert them separately. FineReader is also nice because it converts file formats other than PDFs (Acrobat does not). Cons FineReader sometimes is slow to open a PDF directly, which is why she switched back to Acrobat as the default. Review Source DK DIMITRIOS K. Director Public Policy Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Excellent use of Abby FineReader Ver 16" January 11, 2024 5.0 excelent experience. I am using this programme more than 15 years. Pros Very fast transforming of the different types of documents Cons everything was working very well and vert fast Review Source Similar Products Featured ## Send me user reviews about this product ### Fill out the form and we'll send a list of the top-rated software based on real user reviews directly to your inbox.