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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