PDFgear

What it does

PDFgear is a cross-platform PDF application with installed builds for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android plus browser-based tools. It reads, edits and annotates PDFs, fills forms, converts between PDF and Office or image formats, merges, splits, compresses, signs and runs OCR on scans, with batch modes for conversion. It also bundles an AI copilot for summarising and querying documents. The vendor currently charges nothing and does not require sign-up.

Best for: Individuals and small teams who want a genuinely free all-round PDF editor with offline desktop editing, no account and no watermark.

Worth knowing: The vendor has published that some advanced features will move to paid options, and its own FAQ says certain advanced conversions are processed on PDFgear's Amazon Cloud servers while the AI copilot is cloud-based — so local processing does not cover every feature.

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 · iOS · Android · Web

Website

pdfgear.com

Requires an account

No

Watermark on the free tier

Not verified

Maximum file size

Not verified

Batch processing

Yes

Data residency

Not verified

Open source

No

Self-hostable

No

Licence

proprietary

Redaction

Not determined

Programmatic access

None

Last availability check

Responded in 153 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.

• “Read, edit, convert, merge, and sign PDF files across devices, for completely free and without signing up.”

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

  Confirmed verbatim: the sentence appears unaltered immediately below the hero heading "PDF Tasks Made Easy", with a 4.9 rating and a "10,000+ Reviews" count beside it. The page then does something unusual for a free product: it devotes a section to the economics, headed "Why Trust PDFgear — Curious about why PDFgear is completely free, how secure it is, and how we sustain it without charging?" So the claim is not left as an unexplained promise. Worth recording alongside it that the same vendor's Windows page answers the same question with "why PDFgear is free for the moment", which is a weaker commitment than the homepage implies, and that phrasing is on another page rather than this one.

  Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

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

  Read

  https://www.pdfgear.com/

  From

  the text a browser renders

  SHA-256

  59cb82cf3354fce635861afd370065c39385ed8a23ccf1b40b19fc6f1323a937

  How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://www.pdfgear.com/ 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-pdfgear-com-ea349083.txt.

  What this hash proves, and what it does not

• “Absolutely, PDFgear ensures data security by processing files locally without storing any user data.”

  Checked by us — the source says this Read 21 September 2026

  Confirmed verbatim. The sentence is the answer to an FAQ item headed "Is my data safe with PDFgear?", and it is the vendor's own wording unaltered. Two things about the page it sits on belong in the record. First, the same FAQ block gives the platform list — "PDFgear works with Windows 10, 11, macOS, iOS and our online tools support a range of other devices" — so PDFgear also ships browser-based tools, and "processing files locally" can be true of the desktop application and cannot be true of those. The FAQ answers for the product as a whole without drawing that line, and a reader coming to the claim from the Windows page could reasonably take it as a statement about the company. Second, the answer's supporting evidence is a link to a marketing page rather than to a privacy policy: it points to a page promising "more proofs and tests of its safety". Recorded as the vendor's description; no control was run.

  Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

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

  Read

  https://www.pdfgear.com/pdfgear-for-windows/

  From

  the raw HTTP response

  SHA-256

  cf2630431f7c357b7d06d9929339d0f7631fd4a07d23ec6dc5e1d9928366985c

  How we checked: The FAQ answer does not appear in the rendered text of https://www.pdfgear.com/pdfgear-for-windows/ (visible text 4542 bytes, no match), because the FAQ block is not in the rendered document, so the claim was read from the raw HTML response the server sends: 18493 bytes saved and hashed. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of that raw response, not of the rendered text.

  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.