Don’t get distracted by this converter’s name because it’s more effective than the name implies, and it’s no doubt a very serious tool. Converters for music and videos are what everyone already knows about (especially for YouTube downloads) but when it comes to PDFs, Icecream PDF Converter is a real competitor and leaves lots of people satisfied with the results. So, without further ado, this review will cover all the important details you need to know about using this PDF tool.
Part 1. Icecream PDF Converter In-depth Review
Icecream PDF Converter comes from a collection of software products from developers known as Icecream, and the PDF Converter has a lot of potential to be the best at its job. A free download option is available meaning you aren’t bound by a payment to check out what it offers.
To save you the trouble of installing it yourself, the key features are below.
- ● Convert file formats Word, JPG/PNG, EPUB, ODT, and a long list of others to PDF
- ● Queue more than one file to have bulk converted to PDF
- ● Manage different aspects of the PDFs page layout before converting
- ● Files of different formats can be combined as a PDF with the merge feature
- ● Files can be previewed for an accurate PDF conversion
All of the features that users can access through Icecream PDF Converter are relatively simple and are what we expect from PDF tools nowadays. Even so, it’s apparent that this is a tool which receives attention and for good reason.
1Performance
Since this is a PDF converter review, let’s start by analysing how basic PDF conversions are handled with Icecream’s tool. As we’ve said, converting a PDF document to formats such as images, HTML, GIFs, and several other formats is possible.
Flipping this and instead formatting a file to PDF is similar – images, EPUB, HTML, Word, and more can be converted as a PDF. More so, you can put multiple files on the conversion list and combine them as one PDF.
But it’s not all good things with Icecream PDF Converter and in terms of how the conversions actually perform, things aren’t great.
As part of our testing, we converted a report (as a Word document) which contained photos and a few financial charts to PDF. In honesty, things didn’t go great and only the text was fully converted. The photos were replaced with blank images and accompanied by the original photos’ file names, and the charts weren’t included at all.
After running a few more tests we determined that this was a consistent problem and only files that were purely text (no images, graphs, charts, etc) could be successfully converted. So, for basic documents this tool is fine but anything that contains images is a no-go.
2Free vs PRO Icecream PDF Converter
Before you buy Icecream PDF Converter, it’s only natural that we’d want to find out if the PRO version actually brings more benefits than the free version. As such, the main differences between the two plans are:
- 1. Free Plan has a 5-page limit, PRO Plan is unlimited
- 2. Free Plan limits 3 PDFs for bulk converting, PRO Plan is limitless
…and then there’s the fact that you have to pay for Icecream PDF Converter PRO whereas the free plan is, well, free!
3Pricing Plans
Those differences aren’t the only things to consider when comparing those versions. In addition to comparing them, we also must ask what we get for our money.
- 1. Changing PDF pages to portrait or landscape
- 2. Adjusting image sizes that have already been added to a PDF
- 3. Combine multiple files into a single PDF document
- 4. Split PDF pages across several PDFs
Buying a license will get you all of this and it is priced at just under $19.95, a one-time payment that gets you access to Icecream PDF Converter PRO forever. Remember: these things aren’t included with the free version.
Part 2. Best Alternative to Icecream PDF Converter
What if you don’t want to use Icecream PDF Converter after all? What if instead, you want to look into alternatives? In that case, we’ve got just the tool for you – PDF WIZ, undoubtedly the best alternative to Icecream PDF Converter out there.
PDF WIZ | Icecream Free | Icecream Pro | |
Price | Free | Free | $19.95 |
Pages Limit per PDF | No Limits | 5 Pages | No Limits |
Files Limit per Conversion | No Limits | 3 Files | No Limits |
Merge PDF | |||
Extract Image from PDF | |||
Extract PDF Page | |||
Split PDF | |||
Compress PDF | |||
Encrypt PDF |
Icecream focuses their solution on converting files, and this is obviously fine on their end. PDF WIZ does the same except it goes much further, offering a lot of extra PDF tools and to top it off, it’s not going to cost you a penny.
PDF WIZ – Free PDF Converter
- Convert PDFs to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, images and vice versa
- Have smaller PDF file sizes by using the PDF compressor
- Convert files selectively (only convert specific pages rather than the whole document)
- Extract individual pages and images from a PDF file
- Most features support processing PDFs in bulk (converting, extracting, and compressing)
There are so many impressive things about PDF WIZ which pushes us to confidently say it’s one of the best PDF toolkits you can use. One particularly impressive feature that we haven’t mentioned yet is the PDF Password Protection management feature. You have the option to add a password to PDF documents or even remove the existing password from a file with ease. This alone goes to show that PDF WIZ is among the most practical pieces of software.
Conclusion
To us it’s clear that PDF WIZ is just as good at converting documents as Icecream PDF Converter is, and we think this shows when PDF WIZ is put into action. For that reason, our recommendation is that you grab this free toolkit and see for yourself. Not only will the conversion produce a new high-quality document, but it’ll fit right in with your arsenal of more than capable PDF tools.