Free online PDF editor with 38 tools

Yes. Every tool is free to use, with no watermark on anything you download. None of the PDF tools needs a sign-up to use; downloading a result, or sending a PDF for signature, needs a free account.

Fifteen of the thirty-eight tools run entirely inside your browser tab, so the file never leaves your machine. The file-format conversions — PDF to and from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF and iWork, HTML to PDF, EPUB to PDF, CAD to PDF, and PDF to PDF/A — and Excel Split, Excel Merge, Shrink Excel, Shrink Word, OCR PDF, Resize PDF and Redact PDF all need a server, so they send it over an encrypted connection; that copy is deleted as soon as the result is sent back, unless you are signed in and asked to keep it. The editor needs a server too, but only when you download a preserve-mode edit, so the PDF can be rebuilt with its own fonts. eSign uploads the file to your account, because the request needs it until everyone has signed.

Not to use the PDF tools: you can open a PDF and work on it without signing up. Downloading the result needs a free account. With one, a copy you choose to keep is stored in your account, so it is there from another machine, for 30 days from upload; and sending a PDF for signature needs one, because the request is tracked there.

Yes. Click a line of text to put a cursor in it and type. cherrypdf matches the font, size and spacing already on the page, so the correction sits inside the paragraph rather than on top of it.

A scanned page has no text layer — it is a photograph of a page. cherrypdf opens it as exactly that picture, so you can still mark it up, draw on it, sign it, and reorder or delete pages. What you cannot do is click a sentence and retype it, because there are no letters there to edit, only pixels.

The editor opens a PDF up to 40 MB, and reads the first 100 pages of a longer one — it tells you how many it left behind rather than quietly dropping them. The other browser tools have no fixed cap: the limit is what your machine can comfortably hold in memory, so a very large scan is slower on a phone than on a laptop. PDF to Word runs on a server and has its own caps — 25 MB and 50 pages.