I'm on a low-volume personal boycott against Adobe because of the Dimitry Sklyarov bust 10 years ago. See Wikipedia's entry. It was a long time ago, but, it remains an attack against the First Amendment. /soapbox

Aside from that, Acrobat is expensive. Mac and Linux users don't pay anything to produce PDFs because it's built-in to the printing system. Windows users have to pay.

Also, in 2010, they were pretty lax about dealing with some security issues that led to the proliferation of malware being delivered as PDF files.

The top PDF makers are:

PDF995

Foxit PDF

Docudesk's DeskPDF

Cute PDF

Now PDF

Differences?

All the PDF writers are nearly the same. PDF995 has nagging ads. They all cost around $20 per year. They're also all faster than Acrobat - faster to load and faster to produce a file.

The main difference is the upgrade path. PDF995 is focused on the enterprise, with document signing and light commenting. I have used it and like it.

Foxit has a PDF editor, so you can alter the PDFs and save them out again. I've used only their reader, which is much faster than Acrobat Reader.

Docudesk sells a tool to convert PDFs into Word or other documents, for editing. I haven't used their products.

I don't know CutePDF or NowPDF, but they each have upgrade paths.