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All comparisons

Compared

iLovePDF vs Smallpdf vs Sejda vs Acrobat vs FixMyPDFs

There is no single best PDF tool, and a comparison that concludes otherwise is an advertisement. These services differ in one structural way — where your file is processed — and that single difference decides almost everything else: the free limits, the offline behavior, and whether a confidential document leaves your machine.

By Updated How we write these

Which one, for what

Start here rather than with the table. Most people only have one of these jobs.

  • Editing text inside an existing PDF

    Sejda

    The only one of these whose free web editor genuinely rewrites text in a paragraph rather than pasting a box over it.

  • Making a scan searchable (OCR)

    Adobe Acrobat

    The most accurate OCR of the group, across the most languages. Sejda’s is good and more than adequate for most documents.

  • Legally provable signatures

    Adobe Acrobat

    Certificate-based signing with an audit trail. None of the free tools, including this one, offer a qualified electronic signature.

  • Cloud drives and team accounts

    iLovePDF or Smallpdf

    Both connect to Google Drive and Dropbox, have real mobile apps, and offer team billing and admin controls.

  • A Windows desktop app that works offline

    PDF24

    Free, genuinely capable, and keeps files off the web entirely — the closest thing in this group to a local tool.

  • Confidential documents, and everyday jobs

    FixMyPDFs

    Nothing is uploaded, there is no cap to hit and no account, and it keeps working offline in any browser on any platform.

The structural difference

Everything below follows from one thing: the others upload your file to a server and FixMyPDFs does not.

  FixMyPDFs The uploading services
Where your PDF is processed In your browser, on your own device Uploaded to each service’s servers (online tools)
Upload required No — there is no upload endpoint Yes, for the web tools
Account needed Never Not for everything, but free use is limited
Free use No daily cap; file size limited only by your device Limited on the free plan — see their pricing page
Watermark None, ever None on most free output
Works offline Yes, once a tool has loaded No — the web tools need the upload
Speed limited by Your device Your upload speed, then their servers
File retention Nothing leaves the tab, so there is nothing to retain Held for a period set by each service’s policy, then deleted

Free-tier limits change often, and every figure on this site is dated. Check each service’s own pricing page before relying on a number: the individual comparisons link straight to them.

Where this site loses

A browser can do a great deal, and there are three things it does not do here today. Pretending otherwise would make every other claim on this page worth less.

  • No OCR. A scanned page cannot be made searchable yet, so PDF-to-Word and PDF-to-Excel return nothing from a scan. Acrobat and Sejda both do this well.
  • Edits cover rather than rewrite. Edit PDF changes a line by covering it and writing the new words on top; the old words stay in the file underneath. Sejda rewrites the text inside the file itself.
  • No certified signatures. Flattening fixes a drawn signature in place; it is not a qualified electronic signature and carries no certificate or audit trail.

What is here today is 57 tools covering merging, splitting, organizing, compressing, converting between PDF and Office formats, redaction and protection — the jobs most people actually arrive with, done without an upload, an account or a cap.

One at a time

Questions

Which free PDF tool is best?

It depends entirely on the job. Sejda for editing text inside a PDF, Acrobat for OCR and anything that must be legally provable, iLovePDF and Smallpdf for polished apps and cloud integrations, and a browser tool for everyday work on documents you would rather not upload.

Which of these has the most generous free tier?

Of the uploading services, iLovePDF and PDF24 are the least restrictive day to day; Sejda is the tightest at three tasks an hour. All of them meter something, because all of them are paying for servers. A browser tool has nothing to meter.

Are online PDF tools safe?

The major services are run by real companies with published retention policies, and for an ordinary document they are fine. The question is not whether they are trustworthy but whether the document needs to be uploaded at all — for a bank statement, a contract or a passport scan, the safest upload is the one that never happens.

Do any of them add a watermark?

Not usually on standard free output, though several reserve features for paid tiers and some editing and signing flows are limited. FixMyPDFs has no paid tier, so there is nothing to withhold and no watermark anywhere.

Which should I use for a scanned document?

One with OCR — Acrobat or Sejda. That is a genuine gap here: OCR is not live on FixMyPDFs yet, so a scan cannot be made searchable in the browser. Everything else about a scan, including compressing and redacting it, works.