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Sejda

Browser and desktop PDF editor with 30+ tools and a limited free tier.

Operated by Sejda BV

Visit Sejda

Opens the vendor's own site.

Jobs covered

Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.

Edit Browse all edit tools

editing PDF documents with Sejda, where the online PDF editor page says it can fill out PDF forms online, change PDF text, add text, edit existing PDF text, add images, create and edit hyperlinks, and annotate PDF pages, and the tool list also describes creating free PDF forms, making existing PDF documents fillable, adding text, links, images and shapes, and a Whiteout tool that hides content; the scope is the documented text, image, link, annotation and form editing, and two boundaries are kept: the Whiteout tool is recorded elsewhere as covering content rather than removing it, and editing text already in a scanned page is not claimed because the editor works on the PDF text layer while OCR is the separate job

Merge Browse all merge tools

merging and splitting PDF documents with Sejda, where the Merge tool combines multiple PDFs and images into one document, the Alternate and Mix tool mixes pages from two or more documents alternating between them, the Organize tool arranges and reorders PDF pages, and the split tools extract pages by page range, by bookmarks, by splitting two-page layouts, by target file size and by text occurrences; the free tier limits combining to 30 files and 50 pages, and the scope is the documented merge, mix, organise and split operations, with no claim about preserving signatures, forms or annotations across a merge

Compress Browse all compress tools

compressing PDF documents with Sejda, where the Compress PDF page says the compression algorithm optimizes images, removes unused fonts and images, and saves optimized images at JPEG quality 65 percent by default, with a Good or Best image-quality option, a default 72 PPI image resolution with 144, 288 or 720 PPI options as the maximum image resolution, and a grayscale image conversion option for smaller files; the scope is the documented image, font and image-cleanup compression with the named quality and PPI controls, and no size-reduction percentage or lossless guarantee is claimed

Convert Browse all convert tools

converting PDF documents with Sejda, where the tool list documents PDF to Excel and CSV for table extraction, PDF to JPG, PNG or TIFF images, PDF to PowerPoint, PDF to Text, and PDF to Word DOC with Keep layout and Optimize for legibility options, plus HTML to PDF, JPG to PDF and Word DOCX to PDF; the free tier limits a conversion to 20 pages, and the scope is the documented conversion directions and the two PDF-to-Word layout options, with no fidelity guarantee and no conversion of formats not listed

Sign Browse all sign tools

signing PDF documents with Sejda, where the Fill and Sign PDF page says users can create a signature by typing their name and selecting from over 10 handwriting styles, by drawing with a mouse, trackpad or pointer device, or by uploading an image of their signature, and then place and resize the signature on a PDF page and fill out PDF forms; the scope is those documented electronic-signature methods and form filling, and no certificate-based digital signature, timestamping, long-term validation or audit-trail claim is made

OCR Browse all ocr tools

running optical character recognition with Sejda, where the OCR PDF page says the tool converts PDF scans to searchable text and PDFs, that users select the language of the document so ambiguous words are resolved using the language dictionary, that the output can be a searchable PDF, a plain text file or both, and that the searchable PDF contains invisible text overlaid on the original images at the correct locations; the page suggests inspecting recognised text rather than promising accuracy, the free tier is limited to 10 pages per OCR task while paid plans allow up to 100 pages, and the scope makes no language-count or accuracy guarantee

Protect Browse all protect tools

protecting PDF documents with Sejda, where the Encrypt PDF page, at /encrypt-pdf, offers password protection plus an admin password to change permissions, encryption levels of Medium RC4 128 bits, Medium AES 128 bits and Strong AES 256 bits, and PDF reader permissions for modifying, copying text and graphics, printing, high resolution printing, filling forms, commenting, and inserting, rotating or deleting pages; the page itself warns that some PDF readers ignore these permissions and that they may not be honoured or enforced at all times, and the scope keeps that warning as the boundary rather than claiming enforcement

Where your files are processed

Mixed - depends on version and feature

The vendor's own documentation separates them. On the device: Sejda Desktop for Windows, Sejda Desktop for macOS, Sejda Desktop for Linux. On their servers: The web service. A single answer for the whole product would be wrong for one of them.

The web service uploads: Sejda's privacy policy says uploaded and processed files are stored on Sejda's servers. The desktop application is the other half, and the vendor describes it as working offline with files processed on your computer, in a blog post dated 2016 that the current desktop page read on 4 October 2026 does not repeat.

That is a dated vendor statement rather than something we tested, and the web and desktop answers are kept apart because they are not the same product.

What it does

Sejda is a PDF editor and tool collection available in the browser and as a desktop application for Windows, macOS and Linux. It edits existing PDF text, fills and signs forms, merges, splits, compresses, runs OCR, converts to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and applies password protection across roughly thirty tools.

The free tier needs no account but caps pages, hourly use, file size and OCR page counts.

Best for

People who want to edit existing PDF text in a browser without signing up, and who may later want an offline desktop app under the same licence.

Worth knowing

The free tier is genuinely restricted and the limits differ by surface and task: the web free tier allows three tasks per hour, documents up to 50 MB and 200 pages, one file per task, OCR up to 10 pages, conversions up to 20 pages, images up to 5 MB and combining up to 30 files and 50 pages, while the desktop free tier allows three tasks per day, documents up to 50 MB and 200 pages, compression up to 100 MB, OCR up to 10 pages, images up to 5 MB and combining up to 30 files and 50 pages.

The desktop download page currently says 'Sorry, we no longer support Free Download' next to an Alternative Download option while still describing free use with daily limits, and the vendor FAQ says no perpetual licences are offered, so the desktop free route is not treated here as a current supported download. Pro removes those caps.

Editing the text already in a scanned page is not what the editor does, and converting a scan to Word or Excel needs the OCR tool rather than the converter; adding text, images and annotations to a scanned page is a different operation and the notice allows it. Separately, the Week Pass is a one-time payment for seven days rather than a weekly subscription, and the annual plan is the one that renews.

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 · Windows · macOS · Linux
Website
sejda.com
Requires an account
No
Free tier
Yes
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.

Proprietary. The web service is governed by Sejda's terms of service between the user and Sejda BV, a Dutch company registered with the Chamber of Commerce Amsterdam under number 68286945, effective 28 March 2026, and Sejda Desktop is governed by its EULA.

Current paid plans are the Web Week Pass at GBP 5 per user for 7 days as a one-time payment, Web Monthly at GBP 7.50, Desktop+Web Annual at GBP 63, and the Desktop Week Pass at GBP 7.95; the vendor FAQ says no perpetual licences are offered.

Redaction
Covers it - content is not removed
Programmatic access
None
Last availability check
Responded in 544 ms 21 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.

“Cover part of the PDF page with a white rectangle so the contents is no longer visible. … Whiteout hides but will not completely remove underlying text or images. Not suitable for redacting sensitive data”

What that does not establish

The vendor’s own editor page, not a test we ran. Two strings on it, both read from the live page on 2026-09-22.

The feature list describes the tool as covering - "Cover part of the PDF page with a white rectangle so the contents is no longer visible" - and the Whiteout tool carries the vendor’s own warning: "Whiteout hides but will not completely remove underlying text or images. Not suitable for redacting sensitive data".

That warning is an attribute on the tool rather than body copy, so it is what a user is shown at the point of use, and it is the stronger of the two: Sejda states the limit itself. The fragments are separated by an ellipsis because they are a paragraph and a tooltip, not one sentence.

The verdict moves from `none` to `covers_content` because covering is what the feature does and removal is what it does not claim; DocHub is recorded as covering on the same basis. Sejda does not present this as redaction and none of its pages read here use that word, so a reader looking to redact safely should treat it as a covering tool rather than assume it cannot hide anything at all.

An earlier version of this quote joined the page’s heading and its paragraph with an em dash that does not appear on the page; the heading is now named in `internalNotes` rather than quoted.

https://www.sejda.com/pdf-editor

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.

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How this record was put together

Editorial review.
No editor has signed this record off. That is not the same as nothing having been checked, and the lines below say what has.
Source reading.
No vendor page has been read for this record yet.
Website availability.
The vendor's site was last checked on 21 October 2026.
Behaviour testing.
We have not run this tool ourselves, so everything here rests on the vendors’ own pages.

Sources: sejda.com; sejda.com upgrade, desktop, privacy and help pages. Vendor claims, not independently verified.

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