Xodo for markup, PDFGym for file work: which do you need?

Pick by the job in front of you

Say you are reviewing a 60-page supplier contract, draft-v3.pdf, and your evening looks like underlines, margin notes and three inked question marks on page 41. That evening belongs to Xodo. A reader with a good stylus path is the whole difference between finishing the review and abandoning it, and a compressor tab contributes nothing to it.

Now say the review is done and the annotated file comes back at 31 MB, too large for the client's upload form. That is ten seconds in the compressor: type the size the form demands, download a file that fits. Neither product covers the other's evening, so the fair comparison is not which is better but which evening you are having. Xodo's pricing page states the free tier allows one free action a day with no access to premium online tools, checked 10 September 2026, which settles the file-work half on its own.

Xodo and PDFGym compared

Judge the two sides on what each was built to do, not on a shared checklist that flatters one of them.

Where Xodo wins

Markup, outright. Highlighting a passage, pinning a note to a paragraph, circling a figure with a stylus: this is a mature reader, and PDFGym has nothing in that lane, not even a reading view beyond small previews inside tools. If your work means living inside documents, install the reader and stop comparing.

The pricing is worth quoting because it is unusually legible, checked 20 August 2026. On yearly billing, Web came to 7.99 monthly and covered a catalogue past forty tools. PDF Studio, the desktop app, came to 9.99 monthly with a catalogue past sixty tools, offline use, and a perpetual licence on offer. The Document Suite came to 14.99 monthly, discounted to 8.99 until the end of 2026. Starting the 3-day trial required a payment method, and Drive storage without premium fell to 1 GB. The notable one is the desktop tier sold as a perpetual licence: a single purchase removes both the subscription and the upload question at once.

Where PDFGym fits

Directly after the reading is done. The annotated contract needs to fit an upload limit, the scanned appendix needs its blank pages dropped, the internal draft needs headers and page numbers burned in before it goes out. Page surgery, permanent stamps of text, headers, footers, watermarks or Bates numbers, and size targets all run locally with no daily allowance to spend.

On uploads, Xodo's pricing page states most tools process files on the device locally, with files that do require an upload permanently deleted after one hour, checked 10 September 2026. That mixed model is described more honestly than most competitors manage. PDFGym keeps a single answer instead: no tool uploads anything, so the one-hour window applies to none of them. If annotation plus form filling in a browser is the actual need, the PDFescape comparison and the free editor roundup cover that ground.

How we checked

We read Xodo's pricing page for the free tier, plan prices and processing statements quoted above, on the dates noted with each claim, and matched the PDFGym side against the tool pages and code in this repository. We created no accounts, uploaded no files and ran no timed tests, so this page reflects published statements, not measured use.