About PDF Tools

PDF Tools was founded in 2024 with a simple mission: to make high-quality PDF editing accessible to everyone without compromising privacy. Too many online PDF services require users to upload sensitive documents — contracts, medical records, financial statements — to remote servers. We built this project because we believe personal and confidential documents should stay on your own device.

We are a small, independent team of web developers based in Switzerland who have worked with document processing systems for over a decade. We saw the opportunity to use modern browser technology — WebAssembly, the File System Access API, and mature open-source PDF libraries — to deliver the same professional results that desktop software has offered for years, without any server involvement.

Every tool on this site runs entirely in your web browser. When you upload a PDF, it is read into your browser's memory and processed by JavaScript and WebAssembly code. No file data is ever transmitted to our servers or any third party. We do not log filenames, contents, or any identifying information about the documents you process.

This architecture is not just a marketing claim — it is structurally how the site is built. You can verify this by opening your browser's developer tools and watching the network tab while you use any tool. You will see that no outbound requests carry your file data.

We rely on well-established open-source libraries that have been battle-tested by the document processing community for years. Core PDF manipulation is handled by pdf-lib, a TypeScript library used by thousands of projects. PDF rendering uses pdfjs-dist, the same library Mozilla uses in Firefox's built-in PDF viewer. Optical Character Recognition is powered by Tesseract.js, a WebAssembly port of Google's Tesseract OCR engine.

Our user interface is built with Next.js, React, and TypeScript. The entire codebase follows modern web standards and is continuously tested across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge on both desktop and mobile. We release updates frequently — usually multiple times per week — to fix bugs, improve performance, and add new tools based on user feedback.

Our users include legal professionals redacting discovery documents, accountants combining monthly statements, teachers preparing course packets, small business owners signing contracts, students digitizing notes, and millions of individuals who just need a quick way to merge a few PDFs without signing up for a service. We have served users in over 140 countries, with tools available in English, Spanish, French, and German.

Many of our users are professionals who handle sensitive documents daily. We take that trust seriously. We do not sell user data, we do not track browsing behavior beyond anonymous analytics for improving our site, and we do not require accounts. If you choose to support us, you can do so simply by viewing the occasional advertisement — we do not run subscriptions or paywalls.

The guides and blog articles on this site are written by our team based on our direct experience with document processing. When we write a guide about OCR quality, compression trade-offs, or PDF/A compliance, the recommendations come from hands-on testing — not from generic internet summaries. We periodically revisit older articles to make sure the information reflects current browser capabilities and PDF standards.

If you notice an error in any of our content, find a tool behaving unexpectedly, or have an idea for a tool we should add, we would love to hear from you. Feedback directly shapes our roadmap.

For questions, bug reports, feature suggestions, press inquiries, or partnership proposals, you can reach us by email at support [at] matt-b [dot] ch. We read every message and typically respond within two business days.