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DocuSeal

Contracts signed on your own server: DocuSeal is the most feature-complete open-source, self-hosted alternative to DocuSign. A WYSIWYG builder turns any PDF into a fillable form with 14 field types: signature, initials, date, file upload, checkbox, dropdown, radio, stamp, and more. Documents route to multiple submitters in sequence or parallel, with automated SMTP email notifications, reminders, and a mobile-optimized signing experience that works on any device without an account. Every completed document carries an automatic PDF eSignature with verification and an audit trail. Templates are reusable and can also be generated programmatically - from HTML via API or from PDFs and DOCX files with embedded field tags - and the REST API plus webhooks drive full workflow automation, with embedded signing forms and form builders for React, Vue, Angular, and plain JavaScript. Files store on disk or in S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure. The UI ships in 7 languages with signing in 14. Runs on SQLite, PostgreSQL, or MySQL; AGPL-3.0 licensed with unlimited documents and no per-signature fees.

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StirlingPDF

Adobe Acrobat and Smallpdf, answered by a self-hosted Java web application: Stirling PDF processes every file with its 60+ tools on your own server and deletes it after the task completes. Nothing is uploaded to a third party, which is the whole point for contracts, invoices, and medical records. The toolbox covers page operations (merge, split at page numbers or scanned dividers, rotate, reorder, crop, extract), conversion in both directions between PDF and Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, HTML, and Markdown, OCR that turns scans into searchable PDFs via Tesseract/OCRmyPDF (including PDF/A archival conversion), and security tools for passwords, permissions, watermarks, signatures, and true UI-driven text redaction. A built-in viewer handles annotation, drawing, and text or image insertion, and V2 added stateful processing - upload once, chain multiple tools - plus undo/redo history. For automation, nearly every tool has a REST API endpoint, no-code pipelines combine operations into custom logic chains, and watched folders process files automatically. Enterprise deployments get SSO, user management, and audit logging; the interface ships in 40+ languages. With 84K+ GitHub stars it is the most popular PDF tool in self-hosting, replacing $20/month Acrobat subscriptions with flat infrastructure cost.

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