PDF Tools for Every Need
Tools grouped for students, small businesses, HR teams and legal work, with where each one processes your file
These pages group ProPDF's free PDF tools by the work you do: studying, running a small business, hiring and onboarding, and legal work. Each one lists the tools that fit, explains why they help and states their limits, so you can choose before you open a file.
Every tool is free and needs no account. Each page also says which tools keep your file in your browser and which send it to our server, which matters as soon as a document is confidential.
Free PDF Tools for Students
View recommended tools
PDF Tools for Small Business
View recommended tools
PDF Tools for HR & Recruitment
View recommended tools
PDF Tools for Legal Professionals
View recommended tools
Pick a tool by task
- Put several files together: Merge PDF, then Organize PDF to reorder, rotate or delete pages.
- Send only part of a document: Extract PDF Pages or Split a PDF. What a kept page shares with a page left out, such as the other half of a two-page spread, can stay inside the file, unseen.
- Make a file lighter for email or an upload form: Compress a PDF.
- Turn a document into a PDF: Word to PDF for .docx, .doc, .odt and .rtf files, JPG to PDF for photos and scanned images.
- Get editable text or images out of a PDF: PDF to Word, PDF to JPG or PDF to PNG.
- Sign or mark a document: Sign PDF, Add a watermark or Page numbers.
- Hide or lock information: Redact PDF and Protect PDF; Unlock PDF removes a password you know. Redaction removes the form fields, comments and links under a box, and leaves in the file the bookmarks, the document title and author, and the files attached to the document; the accessibility tags of a tagged PDF lose the redacted text too, except in rare cases.
- Review a document: Compare PDF for two versions, Chat with PDF for questions and a summary.
What each audience page covers
- Students: assembling assignments, getting scans under the size limit of upload portals, turning readings into Word files and asking questions about a long paper.
- Small business: turning quotes and invoices into PDFs, adding a logo as a watermark, signing agreements and sending password-protected files.
- HR and recruitment: building onboarding packets, signing offer letters and removing personal data from files before they are shared.
- Legal professionals: comparing contract versions, redacting by area, numbering the pages of a bundle and encrypting files with AES-256.
Confidential documents: browser or server
If a document should stay on your computer, choose the tools that run in the browser: Merge, Split, Organize, Rotate, Delete Pages, Extract Pages, PDF to JPG, PDF to PNG, JPG to PDF, Watermark, Page Numbers, Sign and Compare. They process the file on your device and do not send it anywhere.
Compress, PDF to Word, Word to PDF, Edit, Redact, Protect, Unlock and Chat with PDF send the file over HTTPS to our server in the Paris region (eu-west-3), which processes it and deletes it when the task ends; the chat keeps the document text and the conversation in your tab, not on the server. Redaction and password protection are server tools, so if a file may not be sent anywhere, handle those two steps another way.
Limits to plan for
- Server tools accept files up to 4 MB; browser tools depend only on your device's memory, but do not support password-protected PDFs, even those that open without asking for a password.
- Tools that read text need a digital PDF: there is no OCR for scans.
- Signatures are visual only, with no certificate, timestamp or audit trail.
- The handoff between tools disappears when you reload the page, so download each result.