Sejda
Browser and desktop PDF editor with 30+ tools and a limited free tier.
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 task: three tasks a day, documents up to 50 MB and 200 pages, compression up to 100 MB, images up to 5 MB, OCR up to 10 pages, and combining up to 30 files and 50 pages. 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 (EULA)
- Redaction
- Covers it — content is not removed
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 473 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 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.
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Compared head to head
- Sejda vs Smallpdf Two browser toolkits that both upload your file, at very different prices.
Alternatives to Sejda
What to use instead of Sejda The tools in this index that do the same jobs, and what separates them.