PDF Tasks – PDF Arranger

PDF Arranger Review: An Honest Look at the Free Page Organizer

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:20:00 +0000

PDF Arranger is a free, open-source desktop program for organizing PDF pages — merging, splitting, reordering, rotating and cropping them in one visual window. It is not a general PDF editor, and this review will not pretend otherwise. What follows is an honest assessment based on the program’s verified feature set in version 1.14.0: what it genuinely does well, where it stops, which platforms it really supports, and who should use it, reach for something else, or use it alongside a paid editor.

What it is, and where it comes from

PDF Arranger began as a fork of PDF-Shuffler, the older page-shuffling tool by Konstantinos Poulios, and has grown into the maintained continuation of that idea. It is a small Python and GTK application built as a front end for the pikepdf library, released under GPL-3.0-or-later, so it is free to use, including commercially, and its source code is open to inspection. The project’s GitHub repository had 5,987 stars as of October 21, 2026 — a popularity signal, not a quality score, and the only audience number we cite in this review. Version 1.14.0, the release this review is based on, was published on May 23, 2026.

What it does well

Visual page organizing. Every open document is shown as a grid of page thumbnails you drag into order. Merging several files, splitting a document into parts, reversing page order and swapping odd and even pages all happen in that one window.
Everyday page craft. Rotate pages in quarter turns, delete and duplicate pages, insert blank pages in sizes from small formats up to A0, A1 and A2, crop white borders or custom margins, and resize pages by percentage or measurement.
Booklets. It can generate and split booklet layouts for folded printing — an unusual feature in free tools, and for many users the reason they keep it installed.
Document finishing. Edit metadata (title, subject, keywords, producer, creator and dates), import images as pages, export pages as PNG or JPEG images or as a rasterized PDF, overlay one page onto another, and print.
Passwords, carefully stated. It opens password-protected PDFs when you know the password, and it can encrypt the file you export. It does not recover or remove unknown passwords.
Offline by design. No account, no upload, no subscription check: documents stay on your computer, which our safety assessment examines in detail.

Where it stops

The shortfalls are the other half of the definition. PDF Arranger cannot edit the text or images inside a page, has no OCR for scanned documents, cannot fill or create form fields, offers no electronic or digital signing, does not compress or optimize file size, and converts nothing to or from Word, Excel or other formats. It has no annotation tools, no document comparison, and no cloud features. Version 1.14.0 preserves and rebuilds document outlines on export in most workflows, though outlines and links can still be lost after operations such as resizing pages or generating booklets. None of this is a defect to expose — it is the boundary of the category. The mistake is only in marketing, ours included if we ever blurred it, that suggests a page arranger is a full editor.

Platforms: the honest picture

Windows and Linux are the real platforms. On Windows, the project publishes an official installer and a portable ZIP for each release. On Linux, the Flathub Flatpak and distribution repositories carry it. macOS is the gap: there is no official Mac package, only documented routes through Nix or a manual source setup, which most Mac users will reasonably decline. If you are on a Mac and need a native organizer, our comparisons point you elsewhere without hard feelings.

Verdict, by reader

Students, home users and office staff who assemble documents — merging coursework, reordering scans, building booklets: this is your tool. Free, offline, and genuinely good at its one job.
Linux users — an especially natural fit, packaged by distributions and Flathub, with the same feature set as Windows.
Mac users — skip the workarounds unless you already live in Nix; choose a native alternative instead.
Anyone who needs to edit text, OCR scans, fill forms, sign or compress — PDF Arranger alone is not enough, and no honest review can make it so. Pair it with a full editor: our PDF Arranger vs Adobe Acrobat comparison and the best free PDF organizers roundup map the options by task.

The bottom line: PDF Arranger does a narrow job completely, for free, in the open, on your own machine. Judge it as an organizer and it is easy to recommend. Judge it as an editor and you are judging a program its makers never claimed to build.

Related guides

Is PDF Arranger Safe? Source Code, Official Downloads and Hash Checks

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

“Is PDF Arranger safe?” is the right question to ask about any free program you download from the internet, and it deserves a factual answer rather than a badge. This page lays out what can actually be verified about PDF Arranger — its licence, its source code, where the genuine files live, and how to check a download yourself — and it is equally clear about the real risks, which have less to do with the program than with where people get it.

The verifiable facts

It is open source, under GPL-3.0-or-later. The full source code is public in the project’s GitHub repository (pdfarranger/pdfarranger), where anyone — including security researchers and the Linux distributions that package it — can read exactly what the program does. Open code does not prove a program is harmless, but it removes the need to take the developer’s word for anything.
It runs locally and offline. PDF Arranger is a desktop application with no account, no sign-in and no upload step: your documents are processed on your own computer and never sent to a server run by the project. For sensitive documents, that architecture matters more than any promise on a download page.
There are no paid tiers or bundled extras in the official packages. The program is free software maintained as an open-source project; the official Windows installer and portable ZIP contain the application itself.

Where genuine copies come from

The official sources are short and specific. On Windows, the genuine files are the installer and portable ZIP attached to releases in the project’s GitHub repository. On Linux, the recommended routes are the Flathub Flatpak listing and your distribution’s own repository. macOS has no official package at all — the project documents only running it through Nix or from source — so any website offering a ready-made Mac installer download for PDF Arranger is offering something the project never made, and it should not be trusted. This site’s position is simple: we only link to official sources, starting with our download page and the Windows installation guide.

Check your download yourself: the 1.14.0 hashes

For the current release, version 1.14.0 (May 23, 2026), the official GitHub release metadata lists these SHA-256 hashes:

Installer (pdfarranger-1.14.0-windows-installer.msi): 33ba1c3028cc81eb364b8eed288389fc8a4869c015ce817b9408a3d31e0e90b0
Portable ZIP (pdfarranger-1.14.0-windows-portable.zip): 71bb8c7d3e9bd1713424ec546681f4cf4d50961020607e1c154ade67ea532615

Verifying takes a minute. On Windows, open PowerShell in the folder where you saved the file and run Get-FileHash .\pdfarranger-1.14.0-windows-installer.msi -Algorithm SHA256; on Linux, run sha256sum followed by the file name. If the long string your computer prints matches the one above, character for character, you have the genuine file the project published. If it does not match, delete the download and get it again from the official source — a mismatch means the file was altered or corrupted on its way to you.

The real risks to watch

The honest risks around a program like this live on third-party download sites, not in the official release. Aggregator sites repackage popular free software, sometimes with altered installers or extra bundled programs riding along, and lookalike pages exist for almost every well-known free tool. The defences are boring and effective: download only from the official sources named above, verify the hash when you can, and be suspicious of any site that wraps the program in its own downloader or asks you to install something else first. Note, too, what this page deliberately does not claim: we make no promises based on third-party scanning services, and no software can honestly be declared risk-free in the abstract — what can be checked, we have shown you how to check.

What about antivirus warnings?

Occasionally a lesser-known free program triggers a generic warning from a cautious antivirus product, especially a brand-new release that few people have downloaded yet. A generic warning is not proof of anything in either direction, and this site will not wave it away with slogans. The checkable responses are the ones already on this page: confirm the file’s hash matches the official release exactly, and confirm the installer came from the official repository rather than a repackaging site. A file that passes both checks is the same file the project’s own maintainers published; a file that fails either check should be deleted without debate.

Related guides

How to Fill PDF Forms (PDF Arranger Has No Form Tools)

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:40:00 +0000

You have a form to complete: a tax worksheet, an application, a registration document that arrived as a PDF with fields to fill in. Filling a PDF form properly means typing into its interactive fields (the format is called AcroForm) so the answers stay as data in the file — the receiving office can read, copy and process them. This guide states plainly what the free organizer this site covers cannot do with forms, and which tools fill them correctly.

What PDF Arranger can and cannot do here

PDF Arranger cannot fill in PDF forms, and it cannot create form fields. It has no form-filling mode, no field detection, and no way to add a text box, checkbox or dropdown to a document. If you open a fillable form in PDF Arranger, you are looking at its pages as pictures of a form — there is nowhere to type your answers. Any suggestion that PDF Arranger fills forms is incorrect.

A form file is still a PDF, so page-level work remains available and sometimes genuinely needed. You can merge the form with supporting documents — ID copies, certificates, attachments — into a single submission file, delete the blank instruction pages the office does not want returned, reorder pages into the sequence the instructions demand, and print the form from PDF Arranger if you are completing it by hand on paper. Just be aware of one caution: if a form already contains filled-in data or digital signatures, re-exporting it from any page organizer can flatten or drop that interactive data, so keep an untouched copy of the original form file aside.

Tools that fill PDF forms

Adobe Acrobat — Acrobat fills interactive forms, and full Acrobat can also create and edit form fields, which matters if the form you received was never made fillable. The free Acrobat Reader covers everyday filling. See Adobe Acrobat (sponsored); Pro is $19.99 per month on an annual plan billed monthly (US pricing, checked October 2026).
Wondershare PDFelement — a desktop editor that fills forms and can build them, including recognizing the blank lines of a scanned paper form and turning them into fields. See Wondershare PDFelement (sponsored).
Sejda (online) — for a quick form on a non-sensitive document, Sejda’s browser tools let you fill fields or type onto the page without installing software. Use the official Sejda site; the file is uploaded for processing, and Sejda has no affiliate relationship with this site — the link is a plain reference.

Disclosure: the product links marked (sponsored) in this article are affiliate links — if you buy through them, this site may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. See our Affiliate Disclosure.

Fillable form, flat form, or paper?

Before choosing a tool, work out what you were actually sent. An interactive form clicks: fields highlight, the Tab key walks you from box to box, and typed answers stay crisp. A flat form is just a drawing of a form — nothing is clickable — and for those, an editor that lets you type text onto the page, or Sejda-style online typing, is the practical route. A scanned paper form is a photograph on top of both problems. And there is no shame in the third option: some offices still accept, or even prefer, a printed form filled in by hand, in which case PDF Arranger’s print button is all you needed from the start. Match the tool to the form you have, not the form you assumed you had.

Save a copy before you submit

Whichever tool fills your form, finish the same way: save the completed form under a new file name, reopen it, and click through the fields once more to confirm every answer survived the save. Forms occasionally lose entries when they are saved by one program and read by another, and the cheapest moment to discover that is before you submit, not after the office writes back. Keep the blank original as well — if the form has to be redone next year, you will be glad the clean copy is still on your disk.

Related guides

How to Convert a PDF to Word (PDF Arranger Cannot Convert Files)

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:20:00 +0000

You need a PDF back in Word: the report only exists as a PDF now, and you need to rewrite sections, reuse the tables, or fill in a document that was only ever sent to you in finished form. Converting PDF to Word means interpreting the page layout and rebuilding it as editable paragraphs, headings and tables in a .docx file — a translation job, not a page job. Here is where the free organizer covered on this site stops, and which converters do the translation well.

What PDF Arranger can and cannot do here

PDF Arranger does not convert PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or any other Office format, in either direction. It has no export-to-Word command and no Office import. The only format crossings it offers are at the picture level: it can import images as PDF pages, and it can export pages as PNG or JPEG images or as a rasterized PDF. Turning a page into a picture is not a Word conversion — the picture pasted into a document cannot be edited as text — and we will not present it as one.

The page-level abilities are still useful around a conversion. If you only need pages 4 to 9 of a 60-page PDF converted, split them out in PDF Arranger first and convert the small file instead of the whole report. If the converted document comes back with one page badly mangled, you can also use PDF Arranger to compare page order and make sure nothing was dropped or duplicated in transit. And if your source is a scan rather than a born-digital PDF, read the OCR note below before converting at all.

Converters that do the job

Adobe Acrobat — Acrobat’s PDF-to-Word export is the benchmark for layout fidelity: multi-column pages, tables and headers usually survive the trip recognizably. See Adobe Acrobat (sponsored); Acrobat Pro is $19.99 per month on an annual plan billed monthly (US pricing, checked October 2026).
Wondershare PDFelement — a desktop editor with PDF-to-Word conversion built in, keeping files on your own machine and handling batches of documents. See Wondershare PDFelement (sponsored).
PDF2Go — an online converter for one-off jobs when you cannot install software: upload, convert, download. Try PDF2Go (sponsored), and keep confidential documents off any online converter, this one included.

Two realities of PDF-to-Word conversion

First, fidelity depends on how the PDF was made. A PDF exported from Word or a publishing program usually converts back cleanly, because real text and structure are embedded in it. A scanned PDF is just page photographs: there is no text to convert until OCR creates some, so convert scanned documents with a tool that includes OCR, and expect to proofread — our guide to OCR explains that step. Second, even a good conversion is a draft, not a resurrection. Complex layouts — text wrapped around images, elaborate tables, forms — come back approximately, and a few minutes of cleanup in Word is normal. If the document matters, compare the conversion against the original page by page before you rely on it.

What about converting the other Office formats?

The same boundary covers the neighbouring requests people bring to this page. PDF Arranger does not convert PDF to Excel or PowerPoint either, and it does not turn Word documents into PDFs — your word processor’s own export or print-to-PDF does that last job natively. For spreadsheets, expect the same rule as Word with an extra twist: a converter has to guess the grid from positioned numbers, so clean, ruled tables convert well while merged cells and multi-line headers often need manual repair in Excel afterwards. The specialist converters listed above handle those formats inside the same programs, which is why one editor usually ends up covering a household’s whole conversion workload instead of a shelf of single-purpose tools.

Related guides

How to Sign a PDF (PDF Arranger Cannot – Here Are Your Options)

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Someone has emailed you a PDF to sign — a contract, a consent form, an agreement — and you need your signature on it and the file sent back. Signing can mean two different things: a drawn or typed signature image placed on the page for everyday paperwork, or a cryptographic digital signature that proves identity and detects later changes, the kind some legal and government workflows require. This guide is clear about what the free organizer this site covers cannot do, and where each kind of signing actually happens.

What PDF Arranger can and cannot do here

PDF Arranger has no signing features at all: no way to draw, type or place a signature, no digital certificate support, and no signature validation. It cannot sign a document, and it cannot tell you whether a signature already on a document is genuine. That absence is total, so there is no partial workaround inside the program to describe.

What it can do is the paperwork around a signature. Before signing, you can use it to assemble the exact file that needs the signature: merge the agreement with its annexes, delete the instruction pages you were told not to return, and order everything the way the other party expects. After signing in a proper tool, PDF Arranger can just as usefully merge the signed copy with supporting documents for your own records. That is page preparation and filing — useful, but it is not signing, and we will not dress it up as signing.

Tools that can sign a PDF

Adobe Acrobat — Acrobat’s Fill & Sign tools cover everyday drawn and typed signatures, and full Acrobat also handles certificate-based digital signatures for workflows that require them. See Adobe Acrobat (sponsored); Acrobat Reader, which is free, covers basic filling and signing, while Pro is $19.99 per month on an annual plan billed monthly (US pricing, checked October 2026).
Wondershare PDFelement — a desktop editor that lets you sign documents locally, a good fit when the file should not leave your computer. See Wondershare PDFelement (sponsored).
Sejda (online) — for a one-off signature on a non-sensitive document, Sejda’s browser-based sign tool avoids installing anything. Use the official Sejda site; remember the file is uploaded for processing, and note that Sejda has no affiliate relationship with this site — the link is a plain reference.

Which kind of signature do you need?

Read the request before you pick a tool. Most everyday paperwork — school forms, delivery confirmations, simple agreements between people who know each other — accepts a drawn or typed signature image. Some regulated workflows, tenders and cross-border legal processes ask specifically for a qualified or certificate-based digital signature, and a picture of your handwriting will not satisfy them, no matter which app placed it. If the request mentions certificates, validation or a specific signing standard, go straight to a tool with certificate support and verify the signature afterwards in the same program. When in doubt, ask the sender which kind they will accept — it is a two-line email that prevents a rejected document.

After you sign: handling the signed copy

A signed document deserves a little care once it comes back. Save the signed version under its own name and keep the unsigned original untouched — you may need it again if the deal changes. If your copy must travel with attachments, merge the signed file and its supporting documents into one package with PDF Arranger, and consider password-protecting the combined file before emailing it, a workflow our password-protection guide covers. Finally, if the other party later questions the signature, the validation has to happen in a tool that understands signatures — Acrobat can report whether a signed file was altered after signing. A page organizer can confirm the pages are all there; it cannot vouch for the signature itself, and a careful sender does not ask it to.

Related guides

How to OCR a PDF (PDF Arranger Has No OCR – Use These Tools)

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:40:00 +0000

You have a scanned document — a contract, a book chapter, a stack of receipts — and the PDF looks like text but behaves like a photograph: you cannot search it, select a sentence, or copy anything out of it. OCR (optical character recognition) is the process that reads those page images and adds a real text layer, turning a picture of words into words a computer can use. Here is the honest position of the free organizer this site covers, and the tools that do the recognition itself.

What PDF Arranger can and cannot do here

PDF Arranger has no OCR. It contains no recognition engine, and opening a scanned PDF in it does not make the document searchable or editable. A scanned page inside PDF Arranger is an image page: you can see it, move it, rotate it and export it, but the program has no way of knowing what the image says. Any claim that PDF Arranger performs OCR is simply wrong.

Where PDF Arranger does earn its place is everything around the OCR step. Before recognition, it can assemble a clean input file: merge scans from several sessions into one document, delete blank and duplicate pages, rotate sideways pages upright, and put the pages in the right order — recognition software does noticeably better on a tidy document. After recognition, the same arranging tools let you insert the OCR-processed pages into a larger document or split the result into chapters. If you are scanning loose pages or photos into a document in the first place, our guide to importing images into a PDF covers that intake step.

Scan quality decides OCR quality

One practical truth before you choose a tool: OCR accuracy is mostly decided before the software ever sees the file. A straight, evenly lit scan at a reasonable resolution, with pages rotated the right way up, will OCR well in almost any engine; a skewed, shadowed phone photo of a crumpled page will produce errors in all of them. Spend two minutes rescanning a bad page rather than an hour correcting recognition mistakes, and run a page of proofreading on anything that will be quoted, filed or signed — OCR is very good, not perfect.

Tools that actually run OCR

Adobe Acrobat — Acrobat’s OCR turns scans into searchable, editable text and is the reference option when the result has to hold up professionally, for example in legal or archival work. See Adobe Acrobat (sponsored); Acrobat Pro is $19.99 per month on an annual plan billed monthly (US pricing, checked October 2026).
Wondershare PDFelement — a desktop editor with OCR built in, well suited to batch-converting scanned paperwork at your own desk without uploads. See Wondershare PDFelement (sponsored).
PDF2Go — an online toolbox that offers OCR among its browser-based tools, useful for a one-off document when you do not want to install anything. Try PDF2Go (sponsored) — and remember that online processing means uploading the file, so keep sensitive scans on desktop tools instead.

A sensible OCR workflow

Put together, the workflow this site recommends is simple. Scan carefully. Use PDF Arranger to order, rotate and clean the pages into one document. Run that document through the OCR tool of your choice. Then proofread the result, search it for a few words you know appear in it as a sanity check, and archive the original scan alongside the recognized version. Each tool does the part it is actually good at, and nothing in the chain pretends otherwise.

One last expectation to set: OCR produces text a computer can search and copy, but the result is a recognized layer over a picture, not a retyped document. Handwriting, stamps over text, faded carbon copies and heavily decorated fonts will still produce errors no matter which engine you choose, so budget the proofreading pass into any project where the words have consequences — contracts, citations, records you will quote from later.

Related guides

How to Edit Text in a PDF (PDF Arranger Cannot – Here Is What Can)

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:20:00 +0000

You need to change words inside a PDF: fix a typo in a contract, update a date on an invoice, correct a name before you send the file on. Editing text in a PDF means reaching into the page content itself — changing characters, fonts and layout — which is a fundamentally different job from arranging pages. This guide is upfront about where the free tool this site covers stops, and which editors pick up from there.

What PDF Arranger can and cannot do here

PDF Arranger cannot edit the text in a PDF. You cannot click into a paragraph and retype it, swap a word, or replace an image inside a page. The program works at the level of whole pages: it merges, splits, reorders, rotates, crops, deletes and duplicates them, edits document metadata such as the title and keywords, and exports the result. Nothing in that feature set touches the words on a page, and no update has changed that.

Two smaller abilities are genuinely useful on the way to an edit. PDF Arranger can extract text and images from a page to the clipboard, which is handy when you want to quote a passage elsewhere or rescue a picture from a document. It can also explode a page’s embedded images into separate pages, and its page-level arranging is exactly what you want after an edit — for example, replacing one outdated page in a long document with a corrected version exported from another program, then re-exporting the assembled file. Our guide to importing images into a PDF covers the related workflow.

Editors that can change the text

Wondershare PDFelement — a full desktop editor built around exactly this job: click into text, retype it, adjust images, and keep working with forms, OCR and conversion in the same program. It is the most direct step up from a free organizer for regular editing. See Wondershare PDFelement (sponsored).
Adobe Acrobat — the commercial benchmark for PDF editing, with the deepest handling of fonts, layout and scanned documents, plus redaction and document comparison for professional work. See Adobe Acrobat (sponsored); Acrobat Pro is $19.99 per month on an annual plan billed monthly (US pricing, checked October 2026).
PDFgear (free) — if the edit is occasional and a subscription is hard to justify, PDFgear is a free editor whose headline features include editing text and OCR. It is linked here purely on merit: see the official PDFgear site and our PDF Arranger vs PDFgear comparison. PDFgear has no affiliate programme that we could find.

Set your expectations before you edit

Even in a proper editor, PDF text editing has limits worth knowing. PDFs store text as positioned runs of characters, not flowing paragraphs, so a replacement word that is longer than the original can crowd its neighbours, and a document whose fonts are not available on your system may substitute a lookalike font for the edited line. Small corrections — a digit, a date, a name — are usually invisible. Rewriting whole paragraphs is often better done by editing the source document and exporting a fresh PDF, then using PDF Arranger to slot the new pages into place. Knowing which job you have saves you fighting the format.

Which route fits your edit?

Match the tool to the size of the job. A one-word correction in a document you will send once is a free-editor job: open PDFgear, fix the line, export, done. Regular editing — client documents every week, forms, scanned paperwork that also needs OCR — justifies a paid desktop editor, because the time saved on fonts behaving and layouts holding together quickly outweighs the price. And keep PDF Arranger in the chain either way: it remains the fastest way to assemble the final file once the corrected pages exist, swapping an edited page into a long document without rebuilding the whole thing.

Related guides

How to Compress a PDF (and Why PDF Arranger Is Not the Tool for It)

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:00:00 +0000

You have a PDF that is too big — an email system rejected it, a form upload capped the file size, or a scanned document turned into a file far heavier than its page count suggests. Compressing a PDF means re-encoding its images and content so the same document takes less space, ideally without anyone noticing a difference. This guide starts with an honest answer about the free tool this site covers, then points you to the tools that actually do this job.

What PDF Arranger can and cannot do here

PDF Arranger has no compression feature. There is no compress or optimize command in the program, and no setting that re-encodes a document to a smaller size. That is not a hidden menu you have missed — compression is simply outside what this page organizer is built to do, and any guide claiming PDF Arranger compresses PDFs is describing a different program.

Two things PDF Arranger can do sometimes make a file smaller as a side effect, and they deserve honest labels. First, page-level cleanup: deleting duplicate or blank pages, or splitting a document so you only send the pages someone needs, genuinely reduces size — because there is less document left. Second, exporting pages as PNG or JPEG images, or exporting a rasterized PDF, changes the file size because every page becomes a picture. That can shrink a file, but it can also make it larger, and it always costs you something: the text stops being text, so it can no longer be searched, selected or read aloud, and fine detail softens. Rasterizing is not compression, and we do not present it as a compression workaround — at most it is a last resort for a document you only ever intend to look at.

Tools that actually compress PDFs

If you need real compression — smaller file, text still text, quality under your control — use a tool built for it:

PDF2Go (online) — a browser-based toolbox with a dedicated PDF compression tool, handy for a one-off file when installing software is more trouble than the task. Try PDF2Go (sponsored). Remember that an online tool means uploading your document to someone else’s server, so keep contracts, ID scans and other sensitive files off online compressors.
Adobe Acrobat (desktop) — Acrobat’s optimizer gives the most control: image resolution, font handling and audit reports showing exactly where the bytes went. It is the right choice when compression is a recurring part of your work. See Adobe Acrobat (sponsored); Acrobat Pro is $19.99 per month on an annual plan billed monthly (US pricing, checked October 2026).
PDFsam Visual (paid) — from the makers of the free PDFsam Basic, the paid Visual edition adds a compression tool for people who prefer a desktop program from an open-source-rooted project. It is sold on the official PDFsam site; this site has no affiliate relationship with PDFsam.
Stirling-PDF (self-hosted) — if you compress files often and want them to stay on your own infrastructure, the self-hosted Stirling-PDF toolbox includes compression among its many tools. Our PDF Arranger vs Stirling-PDF comparison explains what running it involves.

A practical order of attack

Start by asking why the file is big. Scanned documents are usually big because each page is a large image; text documents with a few embedded photos compress far less dramatically. Then delete pages you do not need in PDF Arranger — that part is free and lossless. If the file is still too large, run it through one of the compressors above, compare the result side by side at full zoom, and only replace your original once the compressed copy still reads cleanly. Keep the uncompressed original archived; compression settings that look fine on screen can disappoint in print.