Nutrient
Commercial PDF SDK with a client-side web SDK and self-hosted document engine.
Operated by Orpalis Imaging SAS
Where your files are processed
Mixed — depends on version and feature
The vendor's own documentation separates them. On the device: Nutrient Web SDK running client side. On their servers: Document Engine, hosted APIs and online licence validation. 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 depends on the component. The client-side Web SDK runs in the browser or the application on the user’s device, while Document Engine and the hosted APIs process on a server, so the local-processing badge belongs to the client-side SDK rather than to the family. Customer-hosted does not mean no network calls either, because the licensing guide describes online licence validation, so any air-gap capability has to specify the licence mode. Multiple regions needs a particular managed service or customer deployment source.
What it does
Nutrient, formerly PSPDFKit, sells a family of document SDKs whose web component runs in the browser and can render, annotate, edit, sign, redact and password-protect PDFs on the client. Alongside the client-side web SDK it offers a self-hosted Document Engine and cloud document APIs for heavier server-side work. Licensing is commercial and component-based, sold as annual subscriptions negotiated with sales, and unlicensed rendering watermarks the output.
Best for: Product teams shipping a closed-source web or mobile app that specifically need in-browser encryption and destructive redaction, and that can commit to a negotiated annual SDK subscription.
Worth knowing: No SDK price is published at all, so cost and scope can only be established through a sales conversation. Features such as redaction are licensed as separate components rather than included by default, and unlicensed renders are watermarked. Licensing is product-specific rather than uniformly annual: annual licensing for the Web SDK and Document Engine, with separate usage and subscription models for the hosted APIs. The official evaluation is normally 30 days and watermarked with no licence key or payment information required, which is evaluation access rather than ongoing free production use. Windows, Linux and server SDK scope belongs in the edition fields. The legal pages identify multiple affiliates, so a single entity does not establish the operator or licensor of the former product, and the brand is used with that uncertainty. Redaction requires application before final export and does not automatically sanitise all metadata, attachments or hidden content, and that limitation sits beside the removal badge.
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 · macOS · iOS · Android · API · Self-hosted
- Website
- nutrient.io
- Requires an account
- Not applicable
- Free tier
- No
- Watermark on trial output
- Yes
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Not verified
- Data residency
- Multiple regions
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Licence
- Proprietary commercial, annual subscription under the Nutrient SDK Master Subscription Agreement
- Redaction
- Removes the content
- Programmatic access
- Embeddable library · Browser JavaScript · HTTP API
- Last availability check
- Responded in 85 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 redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
“Redaction annotations are created via RedactionAnnotation and permanently applied via NutrientViewer.Instance#applyRedactions(). … Do not allow final export before applyRedactions() succeeds when compliance/sanitization is required.”
What that does not establish: Vendor documentation for a developer SDK, not a test we ran. It describes the same two-step trap as Aspose and Bluebeam and names it more bluntly than either: creating the annotation is not the redaction, and the vendor’s own warning is not to export before applyRedactions() succeeds. A document exported after marking but before applying looks redacted and is not. Nothing here establishes anything about the separately-branded cloud product.
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.
-
“Nutrient SDK evaluation starts with a 30-day trial with full feature access — no license key and no payment information required.”
Checked by us — the source only partly supports this Read 22 September 2026
The sentence is verbatim, in an FAQ answering whether there is a free trial, but the same answer attaches a condition the claim omits, so this is partial rather than confirmed. The page continues: "Note that PDFs rendered during evaluation include a Nutrient watermark; this is removed once a license is active." A reader who took "full feature access" at face value could plan to evaluate output in a test pipeline or show it to a stakeholder and find every page watermarked, which is exactly the kind of surprise the trial is supposed to avoid. The rest of the answer is generous and worth recording: all platforms are available immediately, the evaluation is 30 days by default with no hard cutoff, and no licence key or payment information is required. The page elsewhere makes clear that pricing itself is quote-only, which is a different and separately useful fact.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 91de37b95894125cae1c22a632b6a18d64e7d8c16b46ae62b05974d316958fa3
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://www.nutrient.io/sdk/pricing/ re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-www-nutrient-io-sdk-pricing-294863fd.txt.
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“With Nutrient Web SDK, you can programmatically redact documents directly on the client with JavaScript.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim. The page carries the sentence "With Nutrient Web SDK, you can programmatically redact documents directly on the client with JavaScript." unchanged, and it is the page's opening description rather than a claim buried in copy. Three things belong with it. First, the vendor's own next sentence makes the operation two-step in the same way Bluebeam, PDF Architect and Power PDF document it: "Redaction annotations are created via RedactionAnnotation and permanently applied via NutrientViewer.Instance#applyRedactions()." The annotation is markup and the permanence arrives at the apply call, and the same page warns "Do not allow final export before applyRedactions() succeeds when compliance/sanitization is required" — the vendor telling a reader that a file exported between the two steps is unchanged. Second, "on the client" is a property of the Web SDK configuration rather than of the product as a whole: the same documentation set carries a server-side path through Document Engine, and its navigation lists self-hosted SDK assets and a remote-server option. Third, we have not tested this SDK, so the claim is recorded as the vendor's description of their own API and not as an observation. No control: this is a commercial SDK requiring a licence, so there is nothing on our instrument to run it against.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 8e6b2d5987ce5a5a3fe9f9de889b6992b1f8d57fe375496be54ff1041ec552ef
- Note
- the method says raw; the saved artifact is a rendered read
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://nutrient.io/guides/web/redaction/programmatically/ re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-nutrient-io-guides-web-redaction-programmatically-c948f59b.txt.
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.