Foxit PDF SDK
Commercial PDF library for embedding rendering, editing, signing and redaction in your own application.
Operated by Foxit Software Incorporated
Opens the vendor's own site.
Jobs covered
Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.
Edit
Browse all edit toolsediting existing PDF content with the Foxit PDF SDK for Desktop and Server, where the developer guide documents page objects for adding and removing text, path, image and form objects on a page and setting their properties, and a paragraph editing module that inserts, deletes and modifies existing text including its content and format, with join, split, link and unlink operations on text blocks, supported on Windows, Linux and Mac from C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Objective-C and Go, requiring the AdvEdit add-on licence and SDK version 10.0 or later
Sign
Browse all sign toolscreating, verifying and removing digital signatures in PDF documents with the Foxit PDF SDK for Desktop and Server, using the built-in signature callbacks for the Adobe.PPKLite filter with the adbe.pkcs7.detached subfilter and a SHA-256 digest or the legacy adbe.pkcs7.sha1 subfilter, signing with a certificate file and its password, getting and setting signature properties and customising signature field appearance, and creating PAdES signatures with the ETSI.CAdES.detached subfilter at the B-B, B-T, B-LT and B-LTA levels the guide defines, with timestamp servers configured through the TimeStampServer and TimeStampServerMgr classes, PAdES being documented as supported from SDK version 7.0
OCR
Browse all ocr toolsrunning OCR on scanned documents and image-based or mixed PDFs with the Foxit PDF SDK for Desktop and Server, where the developer guide documents initialising an OCREngine with a resource directory and languages, configuring OCRConfig options for picture detection, denoise, deskew and resolution, running OCRPDFPage, OCRPDFDocument or OCRPDFDocuments to produce a searchable PDF that adds a text layer or an editable PDF that writes recognition results into document content, and using OCRConvertTo to export recognised content to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or HTML, on Windows and Linux x64 with a licence that includes the OCR module and an OCR add-on resource package, the ABBYY OCR resource package being required from version 12.0, and a command-line OCR tool documented from version 11.1 with page range, language, editable output and output format options
Convert
Browse all convert toolsstandardising PDF versions and converting to standard-compliant output such as PDF/A, PDF/E and PDF/X through the Compliance add-on, which needs its own resource package and a licence unlock code; not Office, HTML or arbitrary format conversion
Where your files are processed
Mixed - depends on version and feature
The vendor's own documentation separates them. On the device: Foxit PDF SDK linked into an application on a device or customer server. On their servers: Licence validation where enabled, plus web and mobile editions. A single answer for the whole product would be wrong for one of them. That is a property of the library itself: what an application built with it does with your file depends on that application, not on this.
It is an embedded library, so it runs inside the application that links it, on a device or a customer server. No server involved is a poor aggregate for that, because a customer server is a server and the web and mobile editions differ.
The vendor explicitly documents local licensing without telemetry or runtime licence-server calls, which is attributed to the vendor rather than presented as a new network test.
What it does
Foxit PDF SDK is a commercial library that puts Foxit's own PDF engine inside your application, with one core API across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and the web. It covers rendering, annotations, form filling, digital signatures, OCR, PDF/A conversion and redaction, and the redaction is sold as a separate add-on rather than included.
It is the same engine family as Foxit's desktop editor, sold to developers who need to build the feature themselves.
Best for
Product teams embedding PDF viewing, annotation or form handling into an application they ship, and teams who want one vendor across mobile, desktop and web rather than a different library per platform. The redaction add-on is aimed squarely at regulated industries - legal, government and insurance are the three the vendor names.
Worth knowing
Redaction is an add-on, not part of the base SDK. A team that licenses the PDF SDK and later needs to redact has bought the wrong thing, and the feature that lawyers and compliance officers care most about is the one sold separately.
There is no published price at all: every page ends in "Request a quote", and licensing is negotiated per platform and per project, so this record cannot tell you what it costs and neither can the vendor's website. A 30-day trial is the only free route, which is why the free-tier field is false rather than unverified - a trial is not a free tier.
Pricing per platform also means the cost scales with how many platforms you ship on, which is easy to underestimate for a library advertised on cross-platform reach. The current desktop and server guide documents a 30-day trial with watermarks on generated pages, so the trial watermark is vendor-documented and scoped to that SDK trial.
OCR and other specialised modules have platform-dependent availability, redaction is an optional licensed module, and the Office-to-PDF conversion add-on is separate from the bidirectional Conversion SDK rather than merged with it. Needing an add-on is not a judgement about the purchase, and how price scales across projects and platforms is not claimed without a quote.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- Windows · macOS · Linux · iOS · Android · Web · Self-hosted
- Website
- developers.foxit.com
- Requires an account
- Not applicable
- Free tier
- No
- Watermark on trial output
- Yes
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Yes
- Data residency
- Self-hosted
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Licence
- Commercial, quoted per project and per platform; 30-day trial
- Redaction
- Removes the content
- Programmatic access
- Embeddable library
- Last availability check
- Responded in 304 ms 21 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
“Safely Remove Text and Media - Foxit's PDF redaction library safely removes text, graphics, and images quickly and easily.”
What that does not establish
The vendor's own add-on page states removal in three separate places, and one of them says permanent: "automatically find and permanently remove sensitive text and metadata before documents are shared". The page also claims metadata is removed automatically, which is more than many tools in this index document.
What this does not establish: a test. This is the vendor's description of its library, not a canary run through it, and the index records eight redaction verdicts as tested while this is not one of them.
It also does not establish that calling the API correctly is easy - the two-step mark-then-apply trap that this index documents for Aspose and others is a pattern this page does not address either way.
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
-
“Our high-performance libraries add robust PDF functionality to enterprise, mobile, and cloud applications across all platforms, using the most popular developer languages and environments.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 1 October 2026
Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01.
This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.
Standing: Not re-read against the live source
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- d109dca2f70f5db3c3fca9aebb4b4b91b12926206ddefa7f9c92341cd29909ce
How we checked
Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.
-
“Foxit's PDF redaction library safely removes text, graphics, and images quickly and easily.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 1 October 2026
Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01.
This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.
Standing: Not re-read against the live source
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- a1bf68e132218602fd40baf32ef1e1605dbb1817f9ec8bf419969756b56cb54f
How we checked
Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.
Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.
Related reading
- Which PDF tools really redact - which tools remove the content rather than cover it.