Others say...

"Value for money, pleased with the purchase"
As a small business owner, I am reluctant to spend money on software. I do my best to find a *free* tool as I can't justify the cost. Updating multiple desktops can be expensive! This time around, I tried out at least 6 different PDF products. A few of these products were freeware, or priced in the $30-$40 dollar range. All of these low cost solutions proved to be buggy or have annoying popups. Some others only allowed me to create PDF files (and do nothing else), and that just didn't cut it! Of course, Adobe is out of my price range. I needed something that would let me create PDf files, as well as make page content changes every now and then ...... in the end I chose Nitro PDF Professional after downloading a demo. I think it is good value for money.

Pros

Price - $99 is reasonable to pay for what you get. I can do almost everything - change text, fill out forms, password protect files, bookmarking, sticky notes. No complaints yet.

Support - I have contacted nitro pdf support on a couple of occasions with 'how do I?' type questions, and they really seem to know their stuff. They usually reply within 48 hours, and are generally helpful overall.

Cons

Not compliant with Vista 64 - I spoke to support and a compatible version should be available soon. Of course, this isn't a show stopper, but it will make a few people in my team very happy! :-)


"Low Expectations"
I needed this software to convert docs, ppt and visio to pdf. This tool often screws up the formatting in some way. I would not buy this product again and purchase Adobe for professional for home use.

"Compares favourably with Adobe - especially at $99"
Nitro PDF Professional

Acrobat and PDF have been a mainstay in our electornic document workflows for many years.

Since Scansoft's PDF Converter and Nitro PDF were both released earlier this year, I have had them both installed within our organisation in order to rate them for prospective roll out through many more seats than what we currently have Acrobat installed on.

The first thing we noticed was that they both used the same base technology that provides the viewing, creation and editing functionality. (As such some of the reviews comparing the two seem somewhat odd!)

There were however differences.

Scansoft PDF Converter includes a tool called 'FormTyper' which basically assists you in adding form fields to your PDF documents. The upside is that it can save you some time when building your interactive PDF forms, but you can also use the standard form tools to add form fields (I found this to also be in Nitro).

Nitro PDF includes a comprehensive set of neat new plug-ins that we have found really beneficial to our business. The Optimize Document feature (like the PDF Optimizer in Acrobat) allowed us to dramatically reduce the size of our PDFs, and the Split File feature breaks down some of our massive PDF files into smaller individual files.

Furthermore, Nitro PDF has released a number of updates to their product since we purchased. Some have fixed bugs and others have added functionality. The next to last release led to us having trouble with activation even though we had the product for more than 5 months. Since then they have released a new update which has rectified those problems and added further functionality. Not all updates have been perfect, but we prefer to have software that is continually being improved. There have been no updates to Scansoft PDF Converter since we purchased.

FWIW We have just decided to roll out Nitro PDF because the feature set worked better with our day to day requirements for PDF workflow.

I would recommend trialing both products in order to decide which you would use.

Hope this helps.

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Update: Jan 2008

Nitro PDF released a new version (5.3) of the software late last year. I have been testing the new version since. The biggest difference is that Nitro PDF is no longer based on the same technology as it previously was. While the functionality is little changed, there are some major differences:

1. The product is far more stable than both the previous versions of Nitro PDF and Scansoft PDF Converter that we had tested. After speaking to the Nitro PDF support team on a regular basis (they were helpful) over the last year or so, it is obvious that the developers have taken note of some of the issues with the previous version. This is a big tick!

2. The interface has changed. Frankly, I am somewhat lukewarm to what they have done. It does use the new Vista ribbon interface though, so some may find its progression a good thing ....

3. This version runs a lot faster on my PC than the previous version. Particularly when creating PDF files which is a good thing.

All in all, it is well worth upgrading to this version. Nitro PDF continues to work hard on improving their software

"STAY AWAY FROM NITRO PDF PROFESSIONAL!!!"
This product was purchased and installed on my computer using XP and Office 2007. We immediately experienced an error message in Word and Excel. Then we noticed if the computer was left on for about an hour and Word or Excel was up, the computer would go into SAFE mode on its own. We sent an email to tech support for 4 days in a row without any response. Then we sent an email to their displayed address (not through the site) and got a response. The response stated that their responses were going into our spam folder. This was not true. After two days with this method of reaching tech support, they did not respond again. We are left $80.00 plus tax out of pocket and had to remove it from our computer. BTW, it did not convert documents as they said it would. It did combine documents initially, but then stopped doing that. This product claims to be a winner, but in fact, it is a loser. Tech Support is invisable; probably the worst I have encountered right up there with Iolo technologies. STAY AWAY FROM NITRO PDF PROFESSIONAL!!!!

"Improvement over version 4"
We were not able to take advantage of the last version because of various problems such as printing documents over say 3 pages! and frequent computer lock-up because of it. Got no where with tech support either. This version seems to be faster, looks better and creates less problems. One trick getting pdf to work right is to download Adobe as the reader and use Nitro to do the conversion or to create forms. Version 4 was a disappointment. Version 5 seems to meet our needs right now even though some of our Visio drawings don't get converted correctly (especially the hatched portions).