MSPs are Taking a Closer Look at PDF Software
Several trends are reshaping buying behavior across IT departments and service providers. Chief among them are SaaS vendor price hikes. With popular tools increasing as high as 20% year-over-year, SaaS costs have far exceeded annual IT budget growth. MSPs are under growing pressure to manage inflated software costs across the stack while maintaining the standards clients expect. Onboarding lower-cost alternatives is an obvious solution, but managing new vendors, products, and procurement models puts significant strain on the business. In short, vendor selection has never been more important.
As a result, MSPs have become increasingly deliberate about which vendors make it onto their roster. It's no longer enough for a product to simply work. The vendor must offer compelling value and be a good fit for the business. Vendor scrutiny is often standard for categories like security platforms, RMM tools, backup solutions, cloud infrastructure, and productivity suites. PDF software, by comparison, rarely receives the same level of attention. In fact, most businesses only consider a single provider.
For many, Adobe Acrobat is the default choice simply because it's the most recognizable name in the category; familiar to users, widely adopted across organizations, and long synonymous with "PDF." Yet, its price tag, support quality, and history of price increases have led to notable pushback from customers. As MSPs work to optimize their tech stack, even routine, long-unquestioned software categories such as PDF are being pulled back onto the table.
Document technology is often undervalued by IT houses. Usage isn't limited to just power users. Dozens of departments rely on PDF tools every day, including HR, accounting, operations, sales, marketing, legal, procurement, and more. For traditional businesses, Foxit's analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data estimates this represents roughly 20% of the workforce. For an MSP managing 500 endpoints, that equates to about 100 PDF licenses. At this scale, even modest cost savings could be significant. Ultimately, what looks like a minor software category is, in practice, a meaningful line item that MSPs can influence.
Factors MSPs Should Evaluate
A category touching 20% of the workforce isn't something MSPs can afford to treat as an afterthought, especially with SaaS costs climbing across the stack. PDF vendors now deserve the same rigorous evaluation as any other part of the tech stack.
The starting point is straightforward: does the solution perform, can it actually do what clients need, and does it save the client money? From there, the questions get more MSP-specific: does selling it reward MSPs with real margin, and does the vendor open up revenue paths beyond PDF licensing itself? Platform breadth matters too, since a vendor that covers multiple document needs can allow for meaningful consolidation, folding several relationships into one.
The operational side is just as important, and often where real differences between vendors show up. Does the vendor align with how MSPs actually run — offering monthly billing and making it easy to provision and manage licenses? And critically, does adoption create unnecessary support work? Products that are hard to use generate tickets. And when a solution is expensive, clients under-license their teams — which pushes employees to adopt their own tools, creating shadow IT risk. It's then the MSP who is left to mitigate the security exposure and protect the client's cyber insurance coverage — a setback MSPs can't afford.
The vendor relationship closes out the picture: is the partner responsive when MSPs call, and does the platform support where document workflows are heading — collaboration, e-signature, automation — or only where they've already been?
Adobe Acrobat vs. Foxit: Comparing More Than Features
Adobe Acrobat's market position is well established, but that doesn't make it the best fit for every MSP or client environment.
Foxit has emerged as one of the most frequently evaluated alternatives to Adobe Acrobat. From a feature perspective, Foxit delivers the capabilities most businesses require for day-to-day document workflows. The comparison extends beyond whether Foxit can handle common business use cases to whether it may create better business outcomes for MSPs and their clients.
Functionality, Cost and Value
On performance and functionality, Foxit and Adobe are increasingly close. Foxit delivers the PDF creation, OCR, editing, collaboration, e-signature, and security capabilities most businesses rely on, and G2 users currently rate Foxit higher than Acrobat, including for ease of use and quality of support. That combination of broad functionality, favorable user reviews, and a lower published list price is what makes Foxit worth evaluating. With subscription plans up to 44% less than Acrobat, Foxit delivers real savings for clients without asking them to accept a lesser product.
MSP Margins
When it comes to what MSPs earn by selling Foxit vs Acrobat, Foxit offers partner margins of up to 20%. Rather than paying a premium for brand recognition, MSPs may prefer to go with the Adobe alternative that can improve partner profitability, allowing them to reinvest in their business or offer additional services to the client to drive stickiness and customer loyalty.
Platform Breadth & Revenue Opportunities
The story doesn't stop at license costs, either. Foxit's eSign, APIs, and SDKs provide MSPs opportunities to deliver billable services — automated document intake, eSignature workflows, document management integrations — work that can generate incremental revenue from each client.
This solution breadth also supports vendor consolidation. Instead of managing separate providers for PDF, eSignature, and document management, an MSP can fold those into a single relationship.
Billing, License Management & Support
Operationally, Foxit's MSP partner program was designed with service providers in mind. Foxit’s dedicated MSP partner program is specifically designed to reduce administrative overhead rather than add to it.
Monthly billing through distributors like Pax8 and Ingram Micro makes it easier to align software costs with client revenue. This flexibility protects MSPs from footing annual software bills if their client churns mid-period. Foxit’s centralized MSP admin console also makes it easy to provision and manage licenses across the client base. Lower licensing costs may also make it easier for organizations to provide authorized tools broadly, helping reduce reliance on unsanctioned alternatives. And on support, Foxit's model favors a smaller, more focused MSP-facing team, aimed at responsive, dedicated support for partners.
Individually, any one of these — lower cost, stronger margin, new services revenue, or a lighter operational lift — might be reason enough to take a second look at Foxit. Together, they add up to something harder to dismiss: a vendor that doesn't just match Acrobat on features but can change the economics of the PDF software category for many MSPs.
Why Foxit Is Worth a Closer Look for MSPs
For MSPs seeking comparable PDF functionality, lower client costs, and a partner-focused licensing model, Foxit is an alternative worth evaluating. More importantly, its broader document workflow platform, which includes APIs, SDKs, eSignature, and native document management capabilities, may give providers opportunities to strengthen client relationships and create new recurring revenue streams that extend well beyond software licensing.
Learn more about Foxit's MSP program >