qpdf

What it does

qpdf is a command-line program and C++ library that performs structural, content-preserving transformations on PDFs: merging and splitting pages, collating, linearising for web viewing, recompressing streams and images to shrink files, and adding or removing password encryption. It also repairs damaged files by rebuilding cross-reference data. It understands the PDF's object structure only — not page content — and can be scripted through a JSON job file or linked against directly.

Best for: Developers and system administrators who want scriptable, dependency-light PDF surgery from a terminal or from their own code.

Worth knowing: It cannot edit page content or convert to other formats, by design, and it has no graphical interface — so it is unsuitable for anyone who is not comfortable at a command line.

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

qpdf.readthedocs.io

Requires an account

Not applicable

Watermark on the free tier

Not verified

Maximum file size

Not verified

Batch processing

Not verified

Data residency

Self-hosted

Open source

Yes

Self-hostable

Yes

Licence

Apache-2.0

Redaction

No redaction feature

Programmatic access

Embeddable library · Command line

Last availability check

Responded in 142 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.

• “qpdf is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License").”

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

  RE-QUOTED 2026-09-22: this claim previously read "qpdf is open source under the Apache License, Version 2.0." — our characterisation rather than the vendor's wording, so a reader could not tell a quotation from a summary. The vendor's own sentence is now in the claim field and what we read from it follows here. The licence page states Apache License 2.0, and the repository LICENSE file is the verbatim Apache 2.0 text. Anyone can repeat this by opening the file.

  Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

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

  Read

  https://qpdf.readthedocs.io/en/stable/license.html

  From

  the text a browser renders

  SHA-256

  da661a54940fba6b73365e7a4a38c2bb7326950d536b40ecf665a51bef9ad823

  How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://qpdf.readthedocs.io/en/stable/license.html rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs, and this sentence found in the rendered text. ALSO RE-QUOTED on the same date: the claim field previously held our own summary of this page rather than the vendor's sentence, which made it impossible to verify by quotation — the schema's own words are "we do not repeat a vendor's claim as though it were our own finding", and the reverse holds too. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the rendered text, held as p9-qpdf.txt.

  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.