A free alternative to Adobe Acrobat
For the everyday jobs — merge, split, compress, sign, fill, convert — you do not need a subscription or an install.
What is different here
Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for. You open a page and the tool is there.
Your file is not uploaded. It is opened, worked on and saved without ever being sent to us. You do not have to take that on trust: open the network panel while a tool runs and watch nothing carry your file out. The site security policy also limits the page to a short, published list of addresses.
There is no file size limit. We measured it: a 635 MB document was compressed without crashing. Limits exist elsewhere because every file costs a server; ours cost us nothing, so we do not invent one.
And once you have run a tool, it keeps working with no network at all. Measured with the server switched off: a valid merged PDF in 751 ms, zero outside requests.
Where Acrobat is still the right choice
This part matters more than the rest of the page.
If you do professional prepress — color separations, ink coverage, print production checks — Acrobat does things no browser tool does, and you should use it.
If you need a signature workflow with an audit trail, identity verification and legal certification, that is a different product category with real obligations behind it. Our signing tool puts a signature on a page; it does not certify who put it there.
Deep structural editing of an existing PDF — reflowing paragraphs across pages as if it were a word processor — is also genuinely better there.
If you need any of those, pay for the tool that does them. For everything else, this is free and always will be.
What you can do right now
Merge, split, rotate, reorder, delete and extract pages. Compress to a target size. Convert to and from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images and more. Sign, fill forms, redact, annotate, add watermarks and page numbers. Run OCR on a scan. Read a PDF aloud. Turn a flat form into a fillable one.
134 tools, ready before you create an account, and no watermark on the output.
Measured on this site
Real runs of our own tools, three times each, on September 28, 2026 (Chrome 153 · Apple M4 Pro). Times vary with the computer or phone you use; the last column is the one that matters for privacy.
| Job and file | Time | Result | Largest upload |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compress6-page scanned PDF · 10.5 MB | 1.1 s | 2.1 MB | 0 bytes |
| Mergethree 10-page PDFs · 28 KB | 0.3 s | 26 KB | 0 bytes |
| PDF to JPG10-page text PDF · 10 KB | 0.3 s | 1.9 MB | 0 bytes |
“Largest upload” is the biggest request the page sent while the job ran; if the file were uploaded, it would show megabytes. You can take the same measurement on any site with the first check below.
How to check any of this yourself
Do not take our word for it, and do not take theirs. These four checks take a minute each and work on any online PDF tool, including this one.
- Open the network tab in developer tools, then run the tool. If your file is being uploaded, you will see it leave. Here, for every tool that takes a file, you will see the page load its own code and nothing carrying your file.
- Turn off your network and run the tool again. If it still works, the processing was never happening on a server.
- Read the privacy page and look for how long files are kept. A service that stores your file will say so, usually with a number of hours.
- Try a file larger than the free limit. Where a limit exists, it usually exists because every file costs the service money.
Common questions
- Is DocuGrip free?
- Yes, with a daily allowance: two runs a day for visitors and three a day in total once you sign in. A paid plan removes the cap. Nothing you make carries a watermark.
- Is there a file size limit?
- There is no separate file size limit on any plan. Very large files depend on the memory of the computer or phone you use.
- Is my file uploaded?
- Not for the everyday tools — merge, split, compress, convert, sign, fill, protect and the rest work without sending your file anywhere; the table above measures it. Tools that use AI send the document to process it and say so on their page.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes. Once you have run a tool, it keeps working without a connection.
Product names belong to their owners and are used here for comparison only. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to them in any way.