Acrobat is the oldest and original PDF app and they released AI recently. We tested it to see how it compared to Macro, and found Macro is way better on speed (2 mins vs seconds to load), quality of the answers, and ability to chat with multiple files at a time. Here’s a detailed comparison video of Adobe Acrobat AI vs. Macro:
As you can watch in the video above and screenshots below there are a few key issues with Acrobat AI vs. Macro.
Acrobat AI can take 2 minutes to load per document.
If you wanna chat with a PDF, you have to wait a few minutes. I couldn’t believe it was this slow but tried it a few times and seems to be the same. Shorter documents are faster but generally if you’re using AI it’s because it’s a long document.
Having to wait so long defeats the purpose of the AI.
Here’s a screenshot of me from the video confused as to why it’s taking forever to load the PDF.
You can’t chat with multiple files in Acrobat.
In Macro you can chat with many docs at once, in Adobe I can’t figure out how to chat with two files. It seems you can upload two files for the AI to process but then can’t chat with multiple at a time. Of course, you could open multiple browser tabs as a workaround but then the AI can’t “see” both documents at once, so it can’t synthesize information across the documents.
In Macro you can easily switch attach multiple files to a chat like this (just drag in from disk or from your existing macro files on the left hand files panel):
Acrobat AI isn’t smart , from our testing at least.
Maybe they’re using an older AI model or something. In the above video demo, we took a look at an earnings transcript and the latest 10-K from Meta. We asked a basic question “What macro factors are effecting the company”. Here are the screenshots for how both systems answered us: Macro uses Claude and you can toggle between all the latest models. Adobe doesn’t say what model they use but in our testing it seems to fall short.
Again from the video, here’s Acrobat providing a non-answer to our question:
And then here’s Claude’s answer in Macro (you can toggle between all the latest models):
As you can see, it’s a real answer that aligns with our question and properly identifies the macroeconomic factors effecting Meta’s business last year.
TL;DW: (though you should watch the video it is funny) Macro outperforms on key things you’d care about like (i) good answers to your questions (ii) user interface (iii) loading really fast instead of taking multiple minutes and (iv) chatting with multiple files at a time.