PDF work shows up in dev life more often than we'd like to admit — exporting docs, compressing build artifacts, merging client deliverables, or converting a spec sheet someone sent as a scanned PDF into something you can actually search. Paid suites like Adobe Acrobat are overkill for most of these one-off tasks.
Here are 10 free, no-signup tools that get the job done, ranked roughly by how often you'll reach for them.
1. ToolTiny — PDF to Word/Excel/PowerPoint
ToolTiny converts PDFs into editable DOCX, XLSX, or PPTX files directly in the browser, alongside the usual merge/split/compress/watermark/password toolkit. No account, no watermark on output.
What's actually useful for dev workflows: it handles presentation-style PDFs (think exported slide decks or design-heavy one-pagers) reasonably well — most converters flatten these into a single unreadable text blob, but ToolTiny keeps the layout intact while still giving you editable text. Good for the "client sent a PDF, I need it as a Word doc by EOD" scenario.
2. Smallpdf
The OG in this space. Smallpdf's PDF-to-Word conversion is excellent at preserving layout — it renders the page as a background image and overlays editable text boxes at the correct coordinates, which is why it handles complex layouts better than most. Free tier caps you at 2 tasks/day though.
3. iLovePDF
Similar feature set to Smallpdf, slightly more generous free tier. Their "Organize PDF" drag-and-drop page reordering is one of the smoother UX implementations out there if you need to quickly reshuffle a multi-doc PDF before sending it out.
4. PDF24
A German tool that's been around forever and quietly does everything — OCR, forms, signing, comparison. Less polished UI than the others but the OCR accuracy on scanned technical docs is genuinely strong.
5. Stirling-PDF
If you want something self-hosted, Stirling-PDF is the open-source answer. It's a Docker container you spin up yourself, giving you a full PDF toolkit (split, merge, compress, OCR, watermark, even API endpoints) with zero file ever leaving your infrastructure. The go-to choice if you're processing anything sensitive — contracts, financial docs, internal reports.
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 frooodle/s-pdf:latest
That's it. You now have a private PDF tool suite on localhost.
6. pdf2docx (Python library)
For when you need this baked into a pipeline rather than a website. pdf2docx converts PDF to DOCX programmatically, preserving tables, images, and basic layout:
from pdf2docx import Converter
cv = Converter("input.pdf")
cv.convert("output.docx")
cv.close()
Solid default behavior, and tunable via kwargs (clip_image_res_ratio, parse_lattice_table, etc.) if the output layout needs adjusting for unusual PDFs.
7. PyMuPDF (fitz)
The underlying engine a lot of these tools (including #6) are built on. If you need low-level access — extracting text with exact coordinates, font metadata, embedded images, or rendering pages to PNG — PyMuPDF is fast and well-documented:
import fitz
doc = fitz.open("file.pdf")
page = doc[0]
text_dict = page.get_text("dict") # spans with position, font, color
pix = page.get_pixmap(matrix=fitz.Matrix(2, 2)) # render at 2x zoom
This is the building block for any custom PDF-to-something converter you'd ever write yourself.
8. pikepdf
For programmatic PDF manipulation — encryption, watermarking, page rotation, metadata stripping — pikepdf (a Python wrapper around qpdf) is more robust than pypdf for anything involving page-level transforms or repair of malformed PDFs:
import pikepdf
pdf = pikepdf.open("input.pdf")
pdf.save("output.pdf", encryption=pikepdf.Encryption(owner="pw", user=""))
9. Ghostscript
Old-school, but still the most reliable way to compress PDFs from the command line — useful in CI pipelines where you don't want a Node/Python dependency just to shrink a generated report before emailing it.
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH \
-sOutputFile=compressed.pdf input.pdf
/ebook gives a good size/quality tradeoff for everyday docs; /screen for aggressive compression.
10. LibreOffice headless
If your server already has LibreOffice installed, you get a free DOCX/PPTX/XLSX ↔ PDF converter via CLI — handy for batch jobs:
libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf --outdir ./out input.docx
It's slower to spin up than the libraries above, but it's the most reliable way to get pixel-accurate Office-to-PDF conversion without paying for an API.
Picking the right one
- One-off task, don't want to install anything → ToolTiny, Smallpdf, or iLovePDF
- Sensitive files, need self-hosted → Stirling-PDF
- Building this into your own app/pipeline → pdf2docx + PyMuPDF + pikepdf cover 90% of cases
- CI/CD compression step → Ghostscript
Curious what other tools people have in their PDF toolbox — drop them in the comments, especially if you've found something good for table extraction, which is still the weakest link in most free converters.