BASALT · JOURNAL
Acrobat or Basalt, decided in five questions
Feature tables are written to be won. Here is a decision procedure instead, including the outcomes where the answer is Acrobat.
One: do you need PDF/A, accessibility tagging, preflight or complex form design?
If yes, use Acrobat. These have no equivalent in smaller tools and no comparison changes that. Stop here.
Two: does your firm run Windows machines?
If the tool has to work for everyone, a macOS only application cannot be the standard. It can be a personal choice for the Mac users, but it cannot be the firm's answer.
Three: how often do you actually open a PDF tool, and for what?
Count last month's sessions, not your imagined typical month. If the list is long and varied, a professional suite is earning its fee. If it is short and repetitive, mostly redaction, merging, numbering and forms, you are paying for breadth you do not use.
Four: does anyone ever have to trust your redactions?
This is the question Basalt exists for. If your output goes to opposing counsel, a regulator or the public, the difference between performing a redaction and being able to prove one is substantive.
Verification before writing, byte reproducible output that a third party can re-run, and an inspector that reports what a file still hides are the specific capabilities. If nobody ever questions your output, they are worth less.
Five: does it matter that documents cannot leave the machine?
For privileged material, medical records or journalistic sources, an engine with no network entitlement enforced at the code-signature level is a property rather than a setting, and it is checkable from outside the application.
For ordinary business documents, a well configured application is adequate and this is not a deciding factor.
The disclosures
Basalt has no automatic update mechanism today. It is macOS only. Its corpus of test documents is synthetic rather than a large real world set, and it has had no third party forensic audit. Acrobat is a mature product with an enormous installed base and none of those gaps.
Those are the things a comparison written to be won would leave out, and they are the things worth knowing before choosing.
Frequently asked questions
When is Acrobat the right choice?
When you need PDF/A conversion, accessibility tagging, preflight or complex form design, when the tool has to run on Windows as well as macOS, or when you regularly use the breadth of a professional suite.
When is a narrower tool the better choice?
When your actual usage is short and repetitive, mostly redaction, merging, page numbering and forms, and when being able to prove a redaction matters because the output goes to opposing counsel, a regulator or the public.
What are Basalt's limitations?
No automatic update mechanism at present, macOS only, a synthetic rather than large real world test corpus, and no third party forensic audit. Those are real gaps against a mature product.
What does Basalt do that a professional suite does not?
Verifies a redaction with an independent parser before writing the file and refuses to produce output it cannot prove, produces byte reproducible results a third party can re-run, and runs its engine with no network entitlement at all, which is checkable from outside the application.
Doing it in Basalt
Basalt is a native macOS PDF toolkit with eighteen tools in one window: merge, split, compress, OCR, Bates numbering, privilege logs, forms, signing, watermarks, comparison and more. Redaction destroys content rather than covering it, and an independent verifier re-opens every written file and proves the material is gone before the file is saved. If it cannot prove it, nothing is written. A one time $29 licence covers up to three Macs, it is free for the first 24 hours, there is no account, and the engine holds no network entitlement at all, which macOS enforces at the code-signature level. Download it at basaltformac.com.
Redaction that proves itself
Basalt destroys the content you mark, then re-opens the file it wrote and proves the content is gone before it saves anything. Your documents never leave your Mac.