When comparing Foxit PhantomPDF Editor vs Adobe Illustrator CC, 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 Adobe Illustrator CC is ranked 9th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Amazing integration with all other Adobe Software (PS, Ae, Id...)
Pro It's the industry standard
Pro Advanced tools
Pro Has all the vector tools you could dream of
Pro Flexible, non-intrusive interface
Small palette menus and the ability to save multiple menu layouts keep the UI out of the way.
Pro There are many tutorials on the internet
Pro Frequent updates
The CC subscription model means that major releases are no longer necessary, so existing users gain immediate access to new features.
Pro Easy to learn
It's easy to learn how to work with this software.
Cons
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.
Con Subscription model
Illustrator CC requires a $19.99/mo (minimum) subscription to use. Adobe no longer sells previous versions of Illustrator.
Con Heavy use of CPU/RAM
Con Steep learning curve
Con Very slow
Even in very good computers Illustrator is very slow.
Con You never truly own this software
As soon as you stop paying you to lose access to the software. This should be illegal.
Con Install useless and intrusive software
When you install any Adobe product it also installs lots of useless and intrusive software and services.
It adds two services and up to three auto-starting software that runs when you start your operating system and keep running constantly. One is for auto-updating, others for "checking" if you are not a pirate and some others that seems to be just to collect information.
Con Imprecise coordinates
Oftentimes your 140 is 139.9997 and as a vector program it doesn't rely much on precision.
Con No proper selection mode
In a vector-art program, the critical selection mode is the one in which objects must be fully enclosed by the selection marquee to be selected. In the simple example shown here, selecting all the circles should merely require you to draw a selection rectangle around them. But in Illustrator, there's no way to avoid selecting other objects as well, even though they're not totally enclosed by the selection box. Year after year, Adobe fails to fix this bizarre oversight, making Illustrator a tedious pain to use.
Con Buggy
Software can be very buggy at times.