PDFluna is a free toolkit for the everyday operations on PDFs — compress, edit, merge, split, sign, convert, OCR, and a dozen more — that runs entirely in your browser. Nothing uploads to a server. Nothing gets logged. We don’t even need an account from you to make any of this work.
Every online PDF tool we used uploaded our files to their servers, and the moment we caught ourselves dragging a salary letter or a signed contract into one of them we stopped to think about what that actually meant. The privacy policies promised the files were deleted within 24 hours. We had no way to verify that, and the whole exchange relied on trust we hadn’t earned the right to ask for.
A few weekends of research later, it turned out the entire pipeline could run in the browser. Modern WebAssembly and well-engineered open-source libraries (PDF.js, pdf-lib, fflate) handle every operation we needed without ever touching a network. So we built the toolkit we wanted to use ourselves, kept the privacy promise architectural rather than aspirational, and put it online for free.
We’re not the first to try this approach — a handful of other tools do parts of it — but we are the first we’ve seen that goes all-in: every tool browser-only, every line of heavy lifting open source, no sign-up, no watermark, no “upgrade for unlimited” CTA in the sidebar.
The short version: when you drop a PDF onto one of our tools, it’s read into your browser’s memory and processed there. The slightly longer version is below.
PDF.js, pdf-lib, and a few specialised libraries (Tesseract for OCR, mammoth for Word, SheetJS for Excel) load on demand and process your files in the same browser tab you opened the page in. Files never reach our servers — there are no servers handling files in the first place.
Other tools’ privacy claims rely on you trusting their server policies. Ours rely on the architecture: there’s no upload to log, no temporary storage to leak, no AI-training pipeline to slip files into. You can verify it yourself in browser DevTools — open the Network tab and watch zero outbound requests carry your file.
Server-side tools wait for your upload to complete, queue your job behind everyone else’s, process, and download the result back. Browser-side tools skip the network entirely. For an 8 MB file on a typical home connection, that saves 30–60 seconds before any actual work begins.
Every library doing the heavy lifting (PDF.js by Mozilla, pdf-lib, fflate, html2canvas, Tesseract.js, SheetJS) is publicly auditable. Anyone with a GitHub account can read the actual processing code, line by line — something the closed-source server tools genuinely cannot offer.
Five things we hold ourselves to. If any of them stops being true, the project lost its point and we’ve got a problem to fix — tell us if you ever notice.
No upload, no temporary storage, no “processed and deleted in 24 hours.” The processing happens where the file already is: your computer, your phone, your tablet.
Same experience for everyone. No daily task limits, no watermark on free output, no “sign up to unlock” gates. The site is supported by display ads on tool pages; that pays the bills.
Every tool page documents what it does well AND what it doesn’t. We’d rather you know up front that, say, our Word-to-PDF rebuilds the document as image-with-text-layer than have you discover it after a botched contract export.
Our reviews page is honest about the project being young. When real third-party reviews start landing on TrustPilot or G2, we’ll link to them with the source.
We don’t collect document content (we can’t — see commitment #1), so there’s nothing to feed into AI training. We also don’t use anonymised analytics for that purpose.
None of this would exist without the work of the open-source PDF community. Every operation in PDFluna is built on top of libraries other people built first — mostly on volunteer time, all under permissive licenses. If you use PDFluna and it does something useful for you, the credit belongs to these projects as much as it does to us. The version numbers are what we currently pin to in production:
All eight projects are publicly auditable on GitHub. If you’re technical and want to understand exactly what your file goes through when you use a PDFluna tool, the code is right there.
A small independent team. We’re not a venture-funded startup, not a side project of a larger software company, not a marketing front for a paid product. PDFluna is the project. We work on it because we use the tools ourselves, and because we think the tradeoff most online PDF services force on you — convenience in exchange for handing over your documents — isn’t a tradeoff anyone should have to make.
For specific contact (support, bug reports, press, business), the contact page has the right email per topic. For general questions, the FAQ probably already has the answer.
The current 15-tool catalog covers the everyday operations. We’re working on:
Updates land on the blog; the changelog is informal but every shipped feature gets a post.
The quickest way to see how PDFluna works is to use it. Open the editor or grab a tool from the homepage — the file you drop in stays on your device.
Hit a bug, or have an idea? Tell us — it goes straight to the team.
We never see your files. Only the message you type — plus basic browser info, to help us debug — is sent.