Spend Less, Get More: How Switching from Legacy PDF Editor Can Elevate Your Business

The PDF is a de facto electronic file format for a wide range of industries, giving organizations a reliable way to present information to others in a format that remains consistent no matter the user’s underlying hardware or software. From financial statements and invoices to purchase orders and healthcare records, PDFs are a fundamental element of day-to-day workflow. It’s no exaggeration to say that without the ability to create and edit PDFs efficiently, many organizations would lose their ability to do business.

As a result, even though legacy PDF editors can be extremely expensive, businesses that depend on PDFs often fear losing functionality or weakening security by moving to a lower cost alternative. It’s an understandable fear. After all, there’s a reason “you get what you pay for” has become such a well-worn cliché. A lower price tag often comes with a pared down, lower-quality product.

But when it comes to PDF editors, a recent study from Forrester Consulting shows that this is not the case. In fact, by switching from a legacy PDF editor to a lower cost alternative, organizations saw a three-year ROI of 284%. In fact, Forrester found that by switching to a lower cost alternative, companies were able to achieve an 84% gross reduction in prior licensing costs and a 70% reduction in annual licensing costs per user.

Of course, lower costs are beside the point if the end result is lower productivity and more limited functionality. However, Forrester found the opposite. Organizations were able to achieve these productivity gains because the lower cost of the alternative product enabled them to afford more powerful features. What’s more, they could also afford to provide these features to a far larger number of employees and not just to power users.

For instance, Kazan Law, a California-based law firm specializing in asbestos litigation, previously used Adobe Acrobat for document redaction, an important capability for their business. Adobe Acrobat did have redaction capability, but the high cost of the software meant that the full version was only available to a limited number of people, so others who were working on documents with a limited set of features had to ask power users to redact documents for them.

This situation created a bottleneck that would lead some users to adopt risky methods of redaction, such as applying sticky notes to the portions they wanted to redact and then rescanning the document The lower cost alternative enabled the firm to provide full functionality to a far wider scope of people, and because everyone now had access to redaction, it lowered their risk of malpractice suits.

Organizations were also able to strengthen security with a lower cost alternative because they could afford to keep up with the latest updates. The law firm, for example, was unable to enable advanced security features with its legacy PDF editor because they would have had to purchase the latest version to deploy them, and the cost of upgrading was prohibitive. With the alternative, upgrades were much more affordable, and vulnerabilities were proactively patched. In fact, security upgrades were so much easier to manage, Forrester found that organizations saved, on average, nearly 3,700 hours annually that were previously spent deploying and managing patches.

Foxit provides a fast, affordable, and secure alternative PDF solution that enables organizations to lower costs, increase productivity, and reduce risk. The company has been in the market for more than two decades, and its solutions are used by more than 485,000 customers and more than 700 million users around the world.

Discover how much more productive your organization could become by getting your own personalized free ROI Report with the Foxit ROI calculator.