About PDFNova

PDFNova is a free online PDF tools platform with a simple idea: everyday document tasks — merging, splitting, compressing, converting and editing PDFs — should work without an account, without an upload queue, and without handing your documents to a server.

How it works

Every working tool on PDFNova runs entirely in your browser, using open-source libraries (pdf-lib for document operations and pdf.js for rendering and text extraction). When you process a file, the work happens on your device. Closing the tab discards the files. There is no server processing, no storage, and no account in this version.

What is working today

22 tools work today: Merge, Split, Organize, Rotate, Delete Pages, Extract Pages, Compress, Grayscale, JPG/PNG to PDF, Text to PDF, PDF to JPG/PNG/Text, Watermark, Page Numbers, Add Text, Crop, Sign, Unlock, Metadata and Flatten. Tools that cannot honestly run in a browser — such as high-fidelity Word, Excel and PowerPoint conversion, true redaction, and password protection — are labelled “Coming soon” with the reason stated, instead of being faked.

Business model

The tools are free. In future, clearly-marked advertisement placements may be added once the site is eligible, and optional premium features (such as saved workflows) may be offered. No advertisement code is loaded in this version, and no payment is requested anywhere on the site.

Limits, stated plainly

Files are limited to 50 MB each. Very large documents are limited by your device's memory. Some tools have honest trade-offs that are stated on their pages — for example, grayscale and unlock rebuild pages as images, so text is no longer selectable in those results, and compression cannot shrink a file that is already compact. Browser interface testing (upload, preview, download on real phones and browsers) is still to be completed by a human tester; the automated tests cover the document processors and the production build.