PDFix

What it does

PDFix is a desktop application and a developer SDK for PDF accessibility work, sold by a Slovak company with a US arm. The desktop tool validates a PDF against PDF/UA, WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 and Section 508 using the veraPDF engine, then helps repair it: auto-tagging, table and list structure, reading order, alt text, font embedding and batch runs over whole folders. The SDK exposes the same engine as a library for Python, C#, Java, C++ and Node.js so remediation can be built into a document pipeline, and both are documented as processing entirely on the customer's own machines and network.

Best for: Compliance teams, accessibility specialists and engineering teams with sensitive or classified PDFs who must remediate at volume without documents leaving their own infrastructure.

Worth knowing: The free download is not a clean free ride: the vendor's FAQ says saved documents carry a watermark until a licence is bought, so a free tier exists but its output is not production-ready. It also does not remove the need for human judgement, and the vendor says so itself: it does not guarantee 100% document accessibility and the responsibility for compliance rests with the user, so a passing validation run is not by itself proof of compliance. Two of the AI actions in its own marketplace send page images to Amazon Textract or OpenAI, which contradicts a blanket reading of its no-upload position. Redaction is an SDK Professional-tier feature and is not available in the PDFix Desktop application — confirmed by its absence from the Desktop product page, pricing, changelog and all 45 Desktop user-guide pages, and by the SDK pricing table ticking it only in the Professional and Enterprise columns. On licensing, free use is not the same as open source: the Desktop Lite checking tier and the SDK Lite reading and rendering tier are permanently free, but a matching core-library licence for the binary was not substantiated in this review, and an examples repository does not establish the licence of what you ship.

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 · API

Website

pdfix.net

Requires an account

Not applicable

Free tier

Yes

Watermark on the free tier

Yes

Maximum file size

Not verified

Batch processing

Yes

Data residency

Self-hosted

Open source

Not verified

Self-hostable

Yes

Licence

Proprietary commercial EULA (PDFix s.r.o.); Desktop Pro and Enterprise licensed per user per year, SDK tiers per instance by quote; SDK Lite licensed under Apache 2.0

Redaction

Removes the content

Programmatic access

Embeddable library · Command line

Last availability check

Responded in 806 ms 16 October 2026

Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 90% 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.

• “PDFix Desktop and PDFix SDK are fully on-premises - your documents never leave your computer or network. There is no cloud upload or SaaS processing.”

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

  Confirmed verbatim. The claim is the first two sentences of the answer to the question "Does PDFix upload documents to the cloud?", which reads: "No. PDFix Desktop and PDFix SDK are fully on-premises - your documents never leave your computer or network. There is no cloud upload or SaaS processing." The rest of the same answer is worth recording because it is the kind of substantiation this index rarely gets: the vendor names USCIS and the Judicial Council of California as users relying on it "for sensitive and classified documents under strict data residency requirements (GDPR, FISMA, HIPAA)", and contrasts itself with "most competitors", which it describes as "Windows-only or web-based SaaS". Named customers and named frameworks are checkable claims, and neither has been checked here. Recorded as the vendor's description of a desktop application and an SDK; we have not run either and 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://pdfix.net/pricing/

  From

  the raw HTTP response

  SHA-256

  d0a1b4f6a84eabec7884aa310c948b548af93e124f5c078377d23771d9e95b28

  How we checked: The FAQ on https://pdfix.net/pricing/ is an accordion that headless Chrome did not render into text — the rendered text is 4868 bytes and contains no match — so the answer was read from the raw HTML response, saved as 246427 bytes and hashed. The sentence appears three times in that response: twice in the markup of the FAQ item and once inside the page's JSON-LD structured data. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the raw response.

  What this hash proves, and what it does not

• “The free PDFix download includes all features - there is no feature restriction between free and paid versions... The only difference is a watermark on documents saved with the free version.”

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

  Confirmed verbatim, including the em-dash: "The free PDFix download includes all features — there is no feature restriction between free and paid versions." The answer then lists what that means in practice — "full WCAG 2.1, WCAG 2.2, PDF/UA (ISO 14289) validation, AI auto-tagging, manual remediation, batch processing — same for SDK" — and closes with the exception the claim also carries, the watermark on documents saved with the free version. This is the second PDFix claim read from collapsed markup in this campaign, after the pricing-page FAQ verified earlier, and the pattern is the same: the vendor's most useful sentences about licensing are the ones a reader has to click to see. Recorded as the vendor's description; no download was made and no control was run.

  Standing: Re-read and matched once per-response tokens were masked

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

  Read

  https://pdfix.net/faq/

  From

  the raw HTTP response

  SHA-256

  79620945abe7a61f0eafef07d4fab7a560781e45b9e5e13b032828dcf13057b1

  How we checked: The FAQ answer is not in the rendered page — https://pdfix.net/faq/ rendered 10082 bytes of visible text containing no match — because the answers sit in collapsed cards. The claim was read from the raw HTML response, 591595 bytes saved and hashed, where the answer appears in a card headed "What does free PDFix version include?". sourceHash is the SHA-256 of that raw response.

  What this hash proves, and what it does not

• “PDFix SDK Lite is permanently free - no registration, no time limit.”

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

  Confirmed verbatim: under the question "Is PDFix SDK free to use?" the answer opens "PDFix SDK Lite is permanently free – no registration, no time limit." The same answer scopes it and names what is included, both of which the claim leaves out: the free tier covers "PDF rendering, reading PDF objects, content extraction, and metadata reading", and above it sit commercial tiers — Basic, Professional and Enterprise — priced by instance count with quote-only pricing. So "permanently free" is accurate for Lite and says nothing about the tiers a commercial user would need, which is the same shape as the PDFix desktop claim verified in this batch: free, complete, watermarked.

  Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

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

  Read

  https://pdfix.net/pricing/sdk/

  From

  the raw HTTP response

  SHA-256

  a108eef301c11a93ab43ac10f63bd27b004daf4c3508167444d1dd0b70bfb939

  How we checked: The recorded source names an FAQ on the SDK pricing page; the answer is not in the rendered text (https://pdfix.net/pricing/sdk/ rendered 5909 bytes with no match) because it sits in a collapsed accordion, so the claim was read from the raw HTML response, 255293 bytes saved and hashed. The sentence appears twice in that response, once in the page's markup and once inside embedded JSON. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the raw response.

  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.