Honestly, depending on what you need it for, there may not be an alternative. I’ve tried a bunch over the years, and most don’t handle overprint, don’t have colour management settings, don’t know about the more complex shading types or type 3 fonts, etc.
There are specialised software packages that do know about these, but they are closed source and expensive, and then ignore other parts of the PDF spec like 3D or animation.
Acrobat is awful bloatware that somehow still lacks basic functionality - but it’s the only one I know of that covers pretty much all of PDF.
PDF, as it evolved from PostScript, is the de facto standard for most print jobs. Commercial print (think magazines and flyers), packaging, large format (e.g. billboards), books, many textile prints, etc. They all use PDF extensively. And very often those PDFs are print technically garbage. Fixing that in the original application is either not possible or, more frequently, requires knowledge the designers simply don’t have. So the print shop’s prepress department does it in PDF directly.