Soda PDF
Subscription PDF suite with a Windows app, a browser edition and online AI tools.
Operated by Avanquest
Where your files are processed
Reported to upload your files
The vendor states that files are uploaded to their servers. We have not independently tested this. This covers the web service. We have not checked desktop app processing, and we do not extend the finding to it.
It is a desktop application for Windows, and the vendor reports that desktop work is offline, with online AI and cloud features as separate surfaces. Browser access on macOS, Linux and mobile is not a native edition, so the two are recorded apart rather than represented as the same product on every platform. Whiteout is kept separate from applied redaction.
What it does
Soda PDF is a commercial PDF suite from Avanquest Software, with a Windows desktop application for offline work and a browser edition that adds cloud storage, AI document chat, translation and e-signature workflows. Coverage is broad: edit, create and convert to and from Office formats, merge, split, compress, OCR, forms, batch operations, comments and redaction. The vendor confirms all plans are subscriptions and that no perpetual licence is offered.
Best for: Offices and teams that want one vendor for both a desktop PDF editor and a browser workflow, and are willing to pay an annual subscription.
Worth knowing: No perpetual licence and no published per-seat price. The headline AI, translation and cloud-storage features exist only in the online edition, so they depend on Soda's servers. Note it also ships a separate Whiteout tool, which is not redaction. The free tier is limited free online tools rather than no free tier, and the exceptions and limits belong per tool: the converter FAQ advertises two files a day or a 3 MB size condition in ambiguous wording, which is quoted carefully rather than combined into a new rule, and the actual free download flow needs verifying. Subscription-only paid plans are supported by the current plans FAQ, while historical enterprise perpetual documents do not establish a current offer. Pricing is recorded as not established in this review rather than as no published per-seat price, because the dynamic checkout has not been inspected. Vendor tool pages disagree about online signing and protection availability, so the specific route and plan need verifying before any universal desktop-only or browser parity claim.
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 · iOS · Android
- Website
- sodapdf.com
- Requires an account
- Not verified
- Free tier
- Yes
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Yes
- Data residency
- Multiple regions
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- No
- Licence
- Proprietary
- Redaction
- Removes the content
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 165 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.
“Soda PDF Desktop has a Redaction tool. This will permanently delete information from your document. It’s the digital equivalent of redacting physical documents.”
What that does not establish: Vendor support documentation, not a test we ran. The sentence is IDENTICAL, word for word, to PDFsam Enhanced’s and PDF Architect’s articles — three unrelated products whose help centres carry the same claim in the same words. That makes it stock support copy about a component they may well license from the same place, rather than three independent descriptions of three tested behaviours. It describes the DESKTOP product; Soda PDF is also a web service, and the guide’s tier note is where the edition question lives.
https://support.sodapdf.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022497011-How-to-redact-my-file
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.
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“Trusted by more than 425 000 users”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the page states "Trusted by more than 425 000 users", with the space-separated thousands separator preserved as the vendor wrote it. No source or date accompanies the figure. It is the most modest social-proof number in this tier — an order of magnitude below SignWell's 80,000 businesses and four orders below CamScanner's 300 million — and the only one in the batch that a commercial PDF suite of this size could plausibly have. That is not verification, and the finding should not be read as one; it is the observation that this figure does not strain belief the way Smallpdf's does.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- fe72c68ca452701f668e21467e30dcb9af6ff3e0439f38df4a89e1f853618fbd
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://www.sodapdf.com/plans/ re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-www-sodapdf-com-plans-454102a8.txt.
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.
Related reading
- Which PDF tools really redact — which tools remove the content rather than cover it.