iLovePDF

What it does

iLovePDF is a cloud service offering around thirty tools for merging, splitting, compressing, converting to and from Office formats, editing, OCR, signing, redacting and password-protecting documents. One account covers a Windows and macOS desktop app and iOS and Android apps, and a separate iLoveAPI product exposes the tools to developers. Free use works but is limited; paid Premium tiers lift those limits.

Best for: General users and small businesses that want a broad PDF tool set across web, desktop and mobile. The web tools need no install; the Windows, macOS, iOS and Android apps are separate downloads, and one account covers them.

Worth knowing: The web service uploads your files to iLovePDF's servers, and it is a poor fit for confidential documents or heavy automation without a paid plan. The free tier restricts which tools you can use and how much you can process, and the limits are set per task rather than once for the product: the pricing page read on 4 October 2026 lists 100 MB for merge and 200 MB for compression on the limited tier, so there is no single maximum to quote. Some tools need an account and some work without one, and the desktop and mobile apps are separate downloads rather than something the web service gives you.

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

Web · Windows · macOS · iOS · Android · API

Website

ilovepdf.com

Requires an account

No

Free tier

Yes

Watermark on the free tier

Not verified

Maximum file size

Not verified

Batch processing

Yes

Data residency

Multiple regions

Open source

No

Self-hostable

No

Licence

Not verified

Redaction

Covers it — content is not removed

Programmatic access

HTTP API

Last availability check

Responded in 84 ms 16 October 2026

Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.

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.

• “Permanently remove visible text and graphics from a document. Use the Redact PDF tool to black out PDF text and sensitive information.”

  Checked by us — the source says otherwise Read 22 September 2026

  The redacted string is still in the file. So is every other marker, and the output contains the same two fonts as the input plus five black fills, so nothing was removed. The vendor's own sentence therefore overstates what the web tool does.

  Standing: Re-read, and the recorded hash was not reproduced

  Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked

  Read

  https://www.ilovepdf.com/redact-pdf

  From

  the raw HTTP response

  SHA-256

  ca3bf6aeb3f30febb49d891eb5a88588c7a91b9b2e847fe3b8d6d2feeb99abda

  Note

  real drift: the page's pricing markup changed — a <span class="pricing__price__code">GBP</span> became a £ character. That has nothing to do with the claim, which our own test separately REFUTED: the redaction tool left the text in the file, as the finding on this claim records. Unlike the other drift notes here, this one does not end "the verdict stands", because it does not.

  How we checked: Read from the live https://www.ilovepdf.com/redact-pdf on 2026-09-22 with scripts/render-page.mjs. The sentence is in the page's meta description, og:description and twitter:description. It is NOT in the rendered text: that page renders as the tool shell plus a cookie banner, 895 bytes of visible copy, whose only redaction line is the subhead "Remove sensitive content from PDFs". sourceHash is therefore the SHA-256 of the rendered DOM (85,277 bytes) rather than of the visible text, because the sentence lives in the head. THE REFUTATION IS THE CANARY TEST OF 2026-09-17: one hand-driven upload of a 1.3 KB two-page canary PDF to the live web tool, under the one-off exception in docs/verifiers.md. Page one carried CANARYREDACTME7F3A2B with a line 40pt above and below it; page two was untouched. Because this tool marks content by SEARCHING rather than by drawing boxes, the canary string was entered in its "Search text" field, the matches were marked, and Redact was applied. The downloaded file was normalised with qpdf, the reference implementation, and searched for every marker. A control ran the identical search against the unredacted original, where all four markers are present. THIS CLAIM WAS REWRITTEN ON 2026-09-22, and the reason is worth keeping: the previous version quoted the tool as warning that you should check the content is "fully covered". That phrase is not on the page — today's read found zero occurrences, and the 2026-09-21 re-read recorded in the original method had already failed to find it, which is what prompted this pass. The guide was quoting it, so the guide was quoting something nobody could source.

  What this hash proves, and what it does not

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.

Compared head to head

• iLovePDF vs Smallpdf The two biggest browser PDF toolkits, both of which upload your files.
• iLovePDF vs PDF24 A paid browser toolkit against a free one, on the fact that matters most.

All comparisons

Alternatives to iLovePDF

What to use instead of iLovePDF The tools in this index that do the same jobs, and what separates them.