PDFsam

What it does

PDFsam is a family of desktop applications rather than a web service. PDFsam Basic is a free, open-source tool for merging, splitting, extracting, rotating and mixing PDFs. PDFsam Visual adds compression, cropping, metadata cleaning and encryption, and PDFsam Enhanced for Windows is a full editor with OCR, conversion, forms and digital signatures. Every edition runs on your own computer.

Best for: Anyone who wants offline, no-upload PDF processing — particularly a free, dependable split and merge tool across Windows, macOS and Linux.

Worth knowing: The editions differ sharply. OCR, conversion, editing and signing live only in the paid Enhanced edition, which is Windows-only and subscription-based, and Visual still needs a licence after a 14-day trial. For merging specifically, the Basic edition is a free installed tool and the vendor documents what a merge needs: page ranges, bookmark handling, field-name collision handling between the source documents, and mixing pages from different files. Those are the facts to compare on, and the Enhanced redaction capability is a separate paid edition rather than something Basic includes. Capabilities and pricing are bound to editions rather than to the brand: OCR, conversion, editing and signing are Enhanced only, Visual needs a licence after its trial, and Basic is the free one. The merge listing names PDFsam Basic, and redaction belongs to the Enhanced edition with its own plan evidence.

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

Website

pdfsam.org

Requires an account

No

Free tier

Yes

Watermark on the free tier

No

Maximum file size

Not verified

Batch processing

Yes

Data residency

Not verified

Open source

Yes

Self-hostable

No

Licence

PDFsam Basic: AGPL-3.0. Visual and Enhanced: proprietary

Redaction

Removes the content

Programmatic access

None

Last availability check

Responded in 280 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.

• “Your files never leave your computer.”

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

  Verbatim on the homepage, where it stands as its own line. The privacy-policy half of the original claim is recorded as a separate claim so that each rests on the page it actually came from.

  Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

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

  Read

  https://pdfsam.org/

  From

  the text a browser renders

  SHA-256

  dcdafd99010e038dc7fda1302cc840016ec27d659d165474cec75c1b3c54247d

  How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://pdfsam.org/ re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and this sentence found in the rendered text. This claim was SPLIT on 2026-09-22 out of a longer one whose evidence spanned two pages. One claim can carry one hash and one evidence file, so a two-source claim cannot be verified by a re-render at all — the pass read the homepage, found a short run of the longer claim's words, and reported it changed when it was in fact fully supported. Dividing it at the source boundary makes both halves checkable. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-pdfsam-org-a0cf9a64.txt.

  What this hash proves, and what it does not

• “All our applications process PDF files locally. No content in your PDF files is automatically sent or uploaded to our servers from our desktop applications.”

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

  Verbatim on the privacy policy. The original single claim carried this and the homepage sentence together, which is why neither half could be verified on its own.

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

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

  Read

  https://pdfsam.org/privacy-policy/

  From

  the raw HTTP response

  SHA-256

  ea695fee184e3b07ef1e40a94c0d53df8ceb9ebfbafe42f167074a33b23273fc

  Note

  neither the raw response nor a render reproduced the recorded hash (83404 chars, recorded ea695fee18…)

  How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://pdfsam.org/privacy-policy/ rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and this wording found in the rendered text. This claim was SPLIT on 2026-09-22 out of a longer one whose evidence spanned two pages. One claim can carry one hash and one evidence file, so a two-source claim cannot be verified by a re-render at all — the pass read the homepage, found a short run of the longer claim's words, and reported it changed when it was in fact fully supported. Dividing it at the source boundary makes both halves checkable. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the rendered text, held as p9-pdfsam.txt — note that this is the RENDERED page, so it differs from the hash of the raw response the original method recorded; both are the same document read two ways.

  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.