About Softool
Softool is a free set of PDF tools. It does the same jobs as the big PDF sites, with one difference that matters: your files are never uploaded.
How it works
When you open a tool, the PDF engine it needs is loaded into your browser tab. You choose a file, your own device does the work, and the result is saved straight to your downloads. The file does not travel anywhere, so there is no upload to wait for and no copy of it on someone else's server.
The site is also locked down by a content security policy that only lets these pages talk to this website. Even if something went wrong, a page could not send your file to another address.
Why it is free
Most of the cost of a PDF website is the servers that process everyone's files. Softool has none of those, because your device does the processing. That is why there are no accounts, no daily limits, no file size caps and no watermarks.
What to expect
Tools that rearrange, protect or mark up PDFs work on the file directly and keep its quality. Converters between PDF and Word, Excel or PowerPoint rebuild the document in the other format, so simple layouts convert cleanly and very complex ones can need a little tidying.
Built on open source
Softool stands on the work of open source projects, used under their licenses:
- PDF.js by Mozilla (Apache 2.0) reads and renders PDFs.
- pdf-lib (MIT) writes and edits PDFs.
- QPDF (Apache 2.0) encrypts and decrypts PDFs.
- Tesseract.js (Apache 2.0) recognizes text in scans.
- docx-preview (Apache 2.0), docx (MIT), SheetJS (Apache 2.0), PptxGenJS (MIT) and pptx-preview (ISC) handle Office documents.
- JSZip (MIT), SortableJS (MIT), jsdiff (BSD) and html2canvas-pro (MIT) do the supporting work.
- Icons are from Phosphor (MIT). The typefaces are Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text (SIL Open Font License).