When comparing Sumatra PDF vs Foxit PhantomPDF Editor, the Slant community recommends Foxit PhantomPDF Editor for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF editors?” Foxit PhantomPDF Editor is ranked 1st while Sumatra PDF is ranked 5th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Starts quickly
Pro Free and open source
Sumatra is available for free, licensed under GPL with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Low resource usage
Pro Does not have heavy editor features
Annotations and other heavy features are just not needed in reader.
Pro Extensive keyboard shortcuts
Pro Elegant interface
Pro Portable
The application consists of a single file that can be run without installation. You can put it on an external device, such as an usb thumb stick and run it on any Windows machine from the thumb stick.
Pro Multilingual
It's available in 69 languages.
Pro Fast and lightweight
Pro Reasonable OCR capabilities
While PhatomPDF's OCR capabilities are not as powerful as those found in some competing products, it will get the job done as long as the layout elements are basic and the text has no particularly odd fonts.
Pro Clean, easy to navigate user interface
PhantomPDF has a ribbon-like interface that allows keeping it clean and intuitive.
Pro Can directly convert Outlook e-mails to PDFs
Single messages, conversations and folders can be converted.
Pro Offers a 30-day trial
Pro Supports password and certificate protection and DocuSign signatures
Pro Author of a document can allow others to leave comments
Through a feature called Shared Review, the author can share a document with others for them to leave comments. Once enabled for sharing through SharePoint, network folder or e-mail, the document can be accessed with Foxit Reader, MobilePDF Business and PhantomPDF Business.
Cons
Con Windows only
Con Lacking in features
Sumatra aims for simplicity at the expense of functionality. For example, there's no way to annotate PDFs or edit them.
Con Fonts are not smooth enough
Not as smooth as e.g. Adobe Reader. No anti-aliasing
Con Cannot crop empty fields
Just got used to this killing feature on Goodreader on Mac.
Con Very frequent crashes
Con Not the best for this price
Con Plugins are 32-bit only and don't work with 64-bit MS Office
Plugins for Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint that allow simplified PDF creation are only available for the 32-bit versions.