When comparing Adobe Acrobat vs Inkscape, the Slant community recommends Inkscape for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF editors?” Inkscape is ranked 3rd while Adobe Acrobat is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Inkscape is:
Inkscape is GPL-licensed and maintains public repositories.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Excellent compatibility with the PDF standard
Since Adobe is the creator of the PDF standard, it stands to reason that Adobe's Acrobat Reader has the excellent support for it.
Pro Cross-platform
Available on Windows, OS X, iOS and Android.
Pro Allows converting MS Office documents to PDFs
You can use the create PDF tool to open any Office document and convert it to an editable PDF or if you're on Windows, you can access the same functionality in Office from the Acrobat tab.
Pro Clean interface
Acrobat has a three tab interface. There are home, tools and document tabs.
The home tab has recently used files as well as files stored in Adobe's cloud services. It will be the first thing shown once you start the program.
The tools tab includes access to all Acrobats functionality. From here you can add tabs to panels or use the search to look for tools.
Pro Acrobat can construct a font to match scanned content
Instead of simply trying to match the font to the closest available, Acrobat can attempt to construct a font based on other characters in the document.
Pro Search allows finding functionality
You don't have to look trough menus to find specific functionality, instead you can use search that's available in the sidebar and the tools tab to find the functionality you're looking for. You don't have to know the name of the tool either, related terms will work.
Pro Good OCR
Acrobat can recognize characters from both both scanned documents and photos of text. Even if the photos are at an angle.
Pro Can automatically detect form fields
Acrobat has a form wizard that will attempt to overlay appropriate form fields (single-line and multi-line text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.) over existing layouts.
Pro Integrated cloud service
Gives access to a cloud service that allows storage and sharing of PDF files.
Pro Allows getting notified when recipients view or download a file
You can use the document cloud to get a shareable link to any of your documents. And it's possible to get notified when a document cloud document gets viewed and/or downloaded.
Pro Desktop app supports electronic signatures
You can both sign as well as send PDFs for signature.
Pro Good annotation options
Acrobat allows commenting on text, highlighting text and leave audio messages.
Pro Video playback support
Flash and H.264 encoded video can be played back in a Adobe Reader.
Pro Allows comparing two separate PDF files for differences
Reader can compare two versions of a PDF file and highlight differences.
Pro Allows real-time collaboration
Since version 9, Reader supports real-time collaboration that synchronizes documents and includes chat.
Pro Touch-friendly interface for the desktop version
The interface has big enough button that they can be used on a tablet sized device.
Pro Free and open source
Inkscape is GPL-licensed and maintains public repositories.
Pro Opens lots of file types
Inkscape supports many common formats for import (including SVG, Photoshop and Illustrator) and its plugin architecture allows more to be added.
Pro Export to different file types
Files can be exported and saved as a "normal" svg, png, jpg, bmp etc. file.
Pro Cross-platform
Pre-built binaries are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Inkscape can be built from source on additional platforms.
Pro Integrates well into a X11-System
Its uses the X11 icon theme and desktop theme(GTK).
Pro It can do anything
A very powerful software that can do pretty match anything!
Pro Measurement Tool
This tool is extremely handy and can not be found in any other vector graphics programs out there.
Pro Live Path Effects
Extremely powerful menu that offers more than 30 powerful Live Path Effects to apply to paths vastly enhancing the application functionality.
Pro Guides, Grids, and Canvas Rotation
Extremely handy features when building complex graphics using Inkscape.
Pro Dark Theme Support
The new 1.0 beta 2 version finally got support for dark theme which normally is only available for commercial software like Affinity Serif, Adobe Illustrator.
Pro The new version 1.1 is looks and feels fantastic
Inskape got UI update: new dockable dialogs.
Pro Interface is available in 29 languages
Basque, British English, Brazilian, Portuguese, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Swedish.
Pro It's really easy and fun
Vector graphics can be created and edited with Inkscape.
Cons
Con Crashes often
Con Very expensive
While there's a free version of Acrobat Reader, it does not allow editing. There's a choice of Standard edition that costs $299, and Pro version for $499.
Con No repsonisive usability
Con Outdated design
Con Subscription
You cannot use the version you paid before.
Con Very slow startup on some systems
Depending on factors like how many fonts you have installed, Inkscape can take upwards of 30 seconds to launch.
Con Uses its own SVG-format by default
Inkscape might use SVG as its default format, however this SVG's contains some additional SodiPodi/Inkscape additions that can be troublesome if you want to import the SVG into some other application.
Con 1.0 is sluggish
Inkscape 1.0 uses GTK 3 which is sluggish and slow for low spec systems( eg. ARM, Celeron, Pentium, Core-i3, Ryzen 3 or Athlon ) compared to previous versions.
Con Buggy
Application is often buggy so it happens from time to time that the popup / right-click menu won't close and stays open. It crashes also sometimes randomly. This makes it almost unusable for productive / business use.
Con Crashes very often
Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now - is one of its standard messages.
Con Since 0.91 the gradient editor is gone
It is now only possible to edit a gradient on screen. but you can't set a stop to a specific percentage anymore.
Con Limited work with ICC CMYK color scheme
Support for ICC color profiles only in SVG files.
Con Uses GTK
It looks an feels like an alien. It also uses now touch-based widgets instead of professional widgets.
Con Y-axis inverted
0,0 coordinates begin in lower left corner, not upper left corner as SVG standards define in Inkscape 0.92.x.
It seems this is now fixed in the 1.0 beta 2 version of the program.
Con A toy for facebook-ist enthusiasts, not for professionals
It's a Linux niche mumbo-jumbo, same as GIMP for raster edit .
Con Based on the GTK widget toolkit
Software is based on GTK, so it might not integrate well in non-GTK environments. It also requires many dependencies on those non-GTK desktops. It also adds dependencies to GTK-environments since it is written in C++ which requires the gtkmm wrapper/interface.
Con Mac version does not look as polished as its versions for Windows/Linux version for the 0.92.x version
It seems that Inkscape 1.0 beta 2 for Mac got some needed attention and it looks a lot better with dark theme support. native DMG installer and they got rid of X11 which is great.
Con Incompatible with previous versions
Sometimes backward compatibility breaks. For example, pre 0.92 SVGs are incompatible with later releases (due different default resolutions).
Con No support for large printing machine system
No support for large printing machine environment, except exporting the resulting artwork to PDF.
Con Under GNU GPL
It is released under GNU GPL which one of the restricted open source license.