Sejda Alternative: Free PDF Tools, No Uploads

PixelTools is a good Sejda alternative if your job is a one-off task on a document you would rather not upload, and Sejda is the better pick if you need its desktop app or heavy, repeated work. Checked September 2026. Sejda's free web app sends your file to its servers and deletes it after 2 hours. PixelTools runs 26 live PDF tools in your browser tab, so the file never leaves your device. That difference drives most of the trade-offs below: privacy and no task caps on our side, a deeper editor and a paid desktop option on theirs. Neither is universally better, so the sections that follow say where each one wins and where each one falls short.

Sejda's free tier is capped per task and per hour. Checked September 2026 on sejda.com/pdf-editor: files up to 50 MB, images up to 5 MB, 50 pages per task, 3 tasks per hour and 30 files per hour. Some operations are tighter: 20 pages per conversion and 10 pages per OCR task. Free users work on a single file at a time, with multi-file input reserved for paid plans. The page also states that files are automatically deleted after 2 hours, and that changing existing text inside scanned documents is not supported. Those caps are reasonable for an occasional job. They bite when you have a 200-page contract, a batch of scans, or several edits in a row.

Sejda's paid plans start at $5 for a 7-day Web Week Pass, then $7.50 per month for Web Monthly, or $63 per year for Desktop+Web, as listed on sejda.com/pricing in September 2026. Paid plans include unlimited documents, all tools, 500 MB uploads, OCR up to 100 pages and longer processing time per task. That is fair value if you use PDFs daily, and the week pass is a sensible way to clear one big backlog. PixelTools has no plan to buy: every PDF tool is free, with no signup and no per-hour counter. The cost is different: heavy work runs on your own device, so a very large file is limited by your browser's memory rather than by a paywall.

Everything runs client-side, using pdf-lib for page operations and pdf.js for rendering. Our merge tool keeps files in a local store, and the edit tool builds its export by burning your added text and images into the original pages, then copying pages in display order. OCR uses tesseract.js with an English model that we self-host rather than fetching from a CDN, rendering each page at 144 DPI and adding invisible text over the scan. The practical result: no upload wait, no server retention window to think about, and the tools still work after the page has loaded even on a slow connection. The limit is that the OCR pipeline is English-only today, and speed depends on your hardware.

Our redaction tool rasterizes only the pages you marked, so the covered text is actually gone from the file, not hidden under a black box. Pages without a redaction region are copied through untouched, so their text stays selectable and the file does not balloon. Compression is deliberately narrow: it recompresses embedded JPEG images at low, medium or high quality and only keeps a result when it is at least 10 percent smaller than the original image data. That means a text-only PDF will barely shrink, which is honest behavior rather than a bug. If your file is mostly vector or text, expect small savings on our compressor and check the result size before you send it.

Sejda wins on editing depth, capacity and platform reach. Our edit tool is an overlay editor: you add text, images and shapes, and reorder, rotate or delete pages, but you cannot rewrite the existing text of a PDF. Sejda's editor is built around changing content already on the page, apart from scanned documents, which its own page says are not supported. Sejda also sells a Desktop+Web plan for offline use, offers larger paid uploads (500 MB against a 50 MB free cap), and stores multi-step workflows. If you regularly reword paragraphs in existing PDFs, work on files larger than a browser comfortably handles, or need an installed app, choose Sejda and pay for it.

PixelTools wins on privacy, cost and friction for everyday tasks. Pick it for merging, splitting, rotating, compressing, signing, filling forms, redacting, watermarking, converting Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, EPUB or images to PDF, and OCR, all without an account or an hourly cap. It suits sensitive files such as IDs, contracts and medical letters, because nothing is uploaded. Pick Sejda for real text editing, huge documents, batch workflows or a desktop app. Many people sensibly use both: PixelTools for the quick, private job, and a Sejda week pass for the occasional heavy edit.