Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Open Source PDF Viewer Using Chrome’s PDF Engine (MIT, WebAssembly)
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…
This is an open-source PDF viewer built with Chrome's PDF engine and WebAssembly, available under the MIT license. It is designed for developers who need to embed PDF viewing functionality into their applications. The… 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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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:…
2025 · github.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 →
- 3PJ
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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2014 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →
- 6PF
Hi HN, I have been working on a set of PDF tools that does all the processing directly in the web browser. From time to time I needed to do some simple PDF manipulations like merging PDF files. Sometimes the files contain my personal data and I was not comfortable using other online services where the file usually is uploaded to a remote server. Behind the scenes there is a small library written in C++ doing the changes to the PDF files. I am using the Emscripten compiler to compile it to WebAssembly that is running in the browser. It was a very good learning for me and it was easier than I…
2023 · pdfux.com · its alternatives →
- 7TA
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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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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We are working on an open-source .docx editor library for apps that need to edit Word documents in the browser. We just shipped 1.0. A lot of existing approaches convert .docx into HTML and lose document semantics along the way. Our editor parses OOXML directly and uses its own rendering+layout engine to produce paged documents with html/css. Edits round-trip back to .docx, so you’re always editing the document, not its representation. The core rendering engine is framework agnostic, with React and Vue ui adapters on top. It’s Apache 2.0. Happy to answer questions.
May 2026 · github.com · 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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A PDF viewer for Vue using Mozilla's PDF.js that supports both Vue2 and Vue3 - arkokoley/pdfvuer
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
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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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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This is a open source version of transactional.dev
2025 · designmypdf.vercel.app · its alternatives →
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Preview Office, PDF, CAD and more in the browser
Jul 2026 · file-viewer.app · its alternatives →
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Private and Instant PDF Tools that Run 100% in Your Browser
2025 · pdfyogi.com · its alternatives →
- 21PA
Here's a neat hack I made recently to do basic PDF editing directly in a browser—without having to upload anything to a server. I was initially looking for a way to do simple PDF modification (extracting pages, merging, and adding page numbers). There are some good server-side tools for this (QPDF, PDFTk, PDFBox, iText, Hummus), but for better speed and privacy I really wanted a 100% client-side solution. There are a few good JavaScript PDF libraries for reading and displaying PDFs (pdf.js) and creating PDFs from scratch (jsPDF, PDFKit), but I couldn't find any for editing existing PDFs. So,…
2018 · its alternatives →
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OpenPDF▲11PDF to Image — private, secure, and in your browser.
2025 · pdf-to-image.probir.dev · its alternatives →
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- 24AW
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 →
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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 →