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dialegein

SnackPDF

Your PDFs stay on your device.

Jobs Compress Merge Edit Convert Extract Sign Protect OCR

Disclosure

Dialegein is operated by the same person who builds SnackPDF. It is listed on the same terms as every other tool here: no paid placement, no favourable ordering, and its claims are checked the same way. Three claims below were tested rather than read off the vendor's page, and the difference between them matters: two were tested on Dialegein's own instrument, and the third — AES-256 password protection — was verified by the SnackPDF project's release suite and has NOT been reproduced by Dialegein. Each finding says which, and how little each test covers.

Where your files are processed

Files stayed on your device when we tested

We supplied a test PDF on 16 October 2026 and no file left the device. Our check confirmed the tool actually ran: A download control appeared after processing, so the tool did run.

What it does

SnackPDF processes files on your device rather than sending them to a remote server. Sixteen tools cover the everyday document jobs — compress, merge, split, extract pages, remove pages, reorder, rebuild, grayscale, PDF to JPG or PNG, extract text, OCR a scan, fill a form, redact, protect with a password, and unlock with a known password — and it works offline once loaded. Its redaction genuinely removes the content rather than covering it, by rasterising the pages you mark, which costs those pages their text layer.

Best for: Anyone handling documents they would rather not upload to somebody else's server, and anyone who needs a redaction they can trust: the marked pages are rebuilt as images, so the text underneath is gone from the file rather than hidden in it.

Worth knowing: Its redaction works by removing the text layer from whole pages, not from the marked area. Drawing one box on page three of a long report rebuilds all of page three as a 150–300 DPI image, so that page loses its selectable text, links and vector structure, and the file grows — the unaffected pages are copied through untouched and keep their text. Its OCR recognises printed English only, and its output is a page-by-page text file rather than a searchable PDF. Form filling handles existing AcroForm fields; scanned and non-interactive forms are not detected, and the saved file keeps live editable fields rather than flattening them. Its password protection is real PDF 2.0 AES-256, but the reader permissions it can set are advisory — a determined tool can ignore them — and encryption is not redaction: anyone with the open password sees everything in the file, including content that was only covered by a rectangle. Unlock removes a known password rather than adding protection, and will not guess, crack or recover an unknown one.

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
Website
snackpdf.com
Requires an account
No
Watermark on the free tier
No
Maximum file size
Not verified
Batch processing
Not verified
Data residency
Not verified
Open source
Not verified
Self-hostable
Not verified
Licence
Not verified
Redaction
Removes the content
Programmatic access
None
Last availability check
Responded in 1905 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

Tested by us on 16 September 2026, on our own canary document rather than read off a product page.

What that does not establish: Tested on our own canary document. It removes the content by rebuilding each affected page as an image, so one redacted box costs that whole page its selectable text, links and vector structure. The test establishes the mechanism and what it costs; it does not establish behaviour on every document.

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 PDFs stay on this device. SnackPDF processes files on your device rather than sending them to a remote server.”

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

    No upload was observed on either surface, and the redaction run made no request at all to any host other than snackpdf.com — the whole job, from file pick to download, ran in the tab. Both tools confirmed they had actually run, by offering a download control afterwards, so neither is a page that failed to load. Redaction was chosen as the second surface deliberately: it is the tool that has to read document content rather than just move a container around, so it is the one where an upload would be most tempting and most damaging. This covers two of fifteen tools; the other thirteen were not tested, and this finding does not cover them.

    Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://www.snackpdf.com/
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    45290b1318964a9d62620a30974eeac2b66ee61b81fc3c14bf8534f351982bd7

    How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://www.snackpdf.com/ re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-16. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-www-snackpdf-com-8d986b58.txt.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

  • “Redact PDF content: draw solid redaction boxes, replace affected pages with raster images and save a PDF without the original page text layer.”

    Checked by us — the source says this Read 16 September 2026

    The redacted string is gone from the saved file, and so is the unboxed text on the same page: drawing one box on that page removed the whole page's text layer, exactly as the vendor documents. The untouched page kept its text layer and its fonts. The file came back as a valid two-page PDF with one image where the redacted page had been, and qpdf reported no syntax or stream errors. This is removal, not covering: the characters are not in the file to be recovered. It is not a claim about the marked area alone — the entire affected page is rebuilt as an image, which is the trade-off the vendor states in its own copy and now in ours.

    Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://www.snackpdf.com/redact-pdf
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    41024813391e30b61ec72d61df7f341508b871adc0abaab37fb17b77e4fdb0f4

    How we checked: The tool was driven in a real browser with a two-page canary PDF. Page one carried CANARYREDACTME7F3A2B, which a box was drawn over, and PAGEONEKEEPVISIBLE, which was left alone. Page two carried PAGETWOSTILLSELECTABLE and was never touched. The downloaded result was normalised with qpdf, the reference implementation, and searched for each string. A control ran the same search against the unredacted original, where all three strings are present — so the search finds what is there and the absences mean something. Its source page was re-read on 2026-09-21 to record the source hash the original reading did not carry; the wording quoted in the claim is unchanged, so this does not re-date the verification, and sourceHash is of that re-read.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

  • “SnackPDF writes PDF 2.0 AES-256 encryption locally in this browser.”

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

    Confirmed. AES-256 at PDF 2.0, with a required open password and an optional owner password, written in the browser with no upload. Three limits are the vendor's own and are recorded rather than inferred: the reader-permission flags are advisory and nothing cryptographic stops a determined tool ignoring them; the implementation throws in a non-secure context rather than silently falling back to the legacy RC4 algorithm; and the vendor states plainly that encryption is not redaction, because anyone with the open password can see content that was only covered. NOT reproduced by this index, and the release suite did not run the two acceptance comparisons it wanted either — a qpdf comparison and Acrobat Reader / macOS Preview — because none of the three was available in that environment.

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

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://www.snackpdf.com/protect-pdf
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    513c35ce5476f388e9be7be861edb2f9646eb1a621ffe632c21fd092ec4beeb6
    Note
    real change on our own page: the rendered text now carries an "Install SnackPDF - optional" prompt that was not there when it was read. Not re-read for the claim itself.

    How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://www.snackpdf.com/protect-pdf re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-17. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-www-snackpdf-com-protect-pdf-f73d17d6.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.

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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Related reading

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.
3 claims taken from the vendor's own pages, read between 16 September 2026 and 22 September 2026.
Website availability.
The vendor's site was last checked on 16 October 2026.
Behaviour testing.
We ran this ourselves. 1 claim here rest on something we observed rather than something a vendor wrote. The file handling was watched directly.

Sources: snackpdf.com — homepage and the tool pages for redact, fill form, OCR, extract text unlock and protect, read 2026-09-16 and 2026-09-17; plus a direct test of the redaction and form-filling tools on the same date, recorded in docs/snackpdf-verification.md.

Compared head to head

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