Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I built a free alternative to Adobe Acrobat PDF viewer
I built EmbedPDF: an MIT-licensed, open-source PDF viewer that aims to match all of Adobe Acrobat’s paid features… for free. Already working: - Annotations (highlight, sticky notes, free text, ink) - True redaction (content actually removed) - Search, text selection, zoom, rotation - Runs fully in the browser, no server needed - Drop-in SDK for React, Vue, Preact, vanilla JS Why? Acrobat is heavy, closed, and pricey. I wanted something lightweight, hackable, and embeddable anywhere. Demo: https://app.embedpdf.com/ Website: https://www.embedpdf.com/ GitHub:…
EmbedPDF is an open-source, MIT-licensed PDF viewer that runs entirely in the browser without requiring a server. It offers annotations including highlights, sticky notes, and freehand ink, plus true redaction that… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hi HN, creator of EmbedPDF here. I recently posted my open-source PDF viewer here, and one thing I really value is that it runs completely offline. I started wondering if we could push that further: could we do full ML layout analysis (detecting tables, headers, columns) directly in the browser? To my surprise, it actually works. The catch: It is far from production-ready. It crashes on most phones, and on older computers, it can be incredibly slow. The why: I believe the future of document processing is local. Many users work with sensitive documents (bank statements, legal contracts) and…
2025 · embedpdf.com · its alternatives →
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BreezePDF lets you edit, sign, merge, compress, redact, OCR, fill forms, extract tables, and use 30+ more PDF tools — all in the browser, no sign-up. Files never leave your computer. I built it because when people search Google for common PDF tasks, many of the tools they find upload documents to a server. I wanted an option that keeps files local instead. I posted an earlier version on HN last spring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962 At the time it only supported a small set of features. Over the last 10 months I rebuilt large parts of it and expanded it to…
2025 · breezepdf.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, Nick here. We're super excited to officially launch PDF.js Express [1]. PDF.js Express wraps a modern React UI around the PDF.js rendering engine to enable PDF annotation, form filling, and signing inside your web app. We've also made some improvements to PDF.js text search, and taken a different approach to how the viewer uses the PDF.js rendering API, resulting in sharp graphics at any zoom magnification [2]. Based on our research, more than 70% of those who try to implement these features on top of PDF.js find it too difficult or time-intensive [3]. For those who are successful,…
2020 · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! I've been working on SimplePDF to solve a problem I encounter weekly: filling out non-editable PDFs [1] --- # About SimplePDF - The documents you load, edit, fill never see the light of my server, everything is processed locally – no remote uploading anything. This includes the PDF generation. - There are no analytics / third party tracking your every move (I do collect usage data, but it's fully anonymous and processed and stored on my server): therefore no annoying cookie banner. You can read more on the Privacy Policy [2] - If someone before you has filled the same document,…
2022 · simplepdf.eu · its alternatives →
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- 8TA
Hello HN! It kept surprising me how much of a hassle it is to generate a PDF with decent HTML5 rendering from my SaaS apps. I tried several free libs and APIs but ended up with botched rendering a lot of times. So I set out to simplify this chore by creating an AWS hosted HTML to PDF conversion API that's based on Chrome. This API will allow a dev to just send the HTML to our API and get a PDF in response without having to worry about running and managing Chrome somewhere in their infra. I just finished the first version of my landing page and hosted pdf generation API…
2018 · its alternatives →
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FiPDF — Convert Images to PDF with OCR, No Upload Needed
2025 · fipdf.netlify.app · its alternatives →
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I created this tool to make it quick and easy to sign PDF contracts, without having to deal with installing additional software and without worrying that my PDFs will get uploaded to a third party. It supports the bare minimum for my most common usecases. It is not intended to be a full-featured PDF editor. Features include filling PDF forms, inserting images and text, and rotating PDFs. Check it out by either picking a PDF of your own - https://photown.github.io/private-pdf/, or with a preloaded sample PDF -…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A PDF viewer for Vue using Mozilla's PDF.js that supports both Vue2 and Vue3 - arkokoley/pdfvuer
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Enable your website visitors to fill, annotate, merge and edit PDF files without leaving your website. Use the iframe, Javascript script or React component.
2023 · simplepdf.github.io · its alternatives →
- 13PP
PDFFiddler Playground is a free PDF playground for manipulating PDF, extracting data from PDF, form filling, archiving, merging grouping and many many more. It is powered through Domain-driven custom scripting language (equivalent to Javascript) which can be quickly written through powerful editor with intellisense support. It has dozens of ready made template to play with. Please check out below link https://playground.pdffiddler.com/?apps=true Few templates, quick links has been added below 1) Merging group of PDF -…
2020 · its alternatives →
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Easily embed Adobe PDF viewer within any web application
2020 · developer.adobe.com · its alternatives →
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Hey everyone, I recently built a free and open-source tool that lets you manually redact PDFs and images right in your browser—no sign-ups, no watermarks. I also added an AI-powered auto-redaction feature to detect and remove sensitive info. Since this part uses external processing (OCR + AI), there are usage limits: you can auto-redact up to 3 single-page PDFs or images for free each day. Higher usage and multi-page support require a paid account. Right now, it works great for removing sensitive details like names, addresses, and emails, but I’d love to get your thoughts: • What redaction…
2025 · magicredact.com · its alternatives →
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100% free PDF converter & editor. No sign-up required.
Jun 2026 · thepdfninja.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I'm the creator of LocalPDF (https://localpdf.online). The thing I'm sharing here is Studio: https://localpdf.online/app/studio Most PDF apps are built around isolated tools — merge, split, rotate, delete pages, edit text, and so on. That works fine for one-off tasks, but a lot of real PDF work isn't one-off. Usually it's more like: open a few files, compare them, pull pages from one into another, remove junk, reorder things, make a couple of edits, then export the result. That workflow always felt awkward to me in traditional PDF editors because you keep…
Dec 2025 · localpdf.online · its alternatives →
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Edit, compare, redact, OCR, compress and convert PDFs to Word or Excel on your device. RevPDF is free on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Jan 2026 · revpdf.com · its alternatives →
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React-print-pdf is a new open-source library that simplifies PDF creation with React. You can design your PDFs like a website, integrate data from your database to your documents, and reuse community components and templates or build your own. Created by three friends who were frustrated by existing solutions and wanted to make PDF creation easier for everyone. Now it’s yours. What are your thoughts on it ?!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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FavorPDF▲10Every PDF tool you need — free, private, no sign-up
Jul 2026 · favorpdf.com · its alternatives →
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Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com · its alternatives →
- 24PA
I banged this out over the weekend. It's really rough though. https://github.com/burtonator/pdf-annotation-exporter Basically I have it working with: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html Whereby I can paste the pos.js into the console and it can export PDF annotations with screenshots of the annotation. I intend on using this with Anki to read more complex books and take notes with it. Now I just need to wire it all together with chrome headless and PDF.js
2018 · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Open Source PDF Viewer Using Chrome’s PDF Engine (MIT, WebAssembly) alternatives
- Free, in-browser PDF editor alternatives
- Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling alternatives
- Simplepdf.eu – a browser-based PDF annotator / editor alternatives
- WebPDF alternatives
- FlexPDF alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →