Adobe Acrobat Pro costs US$239 per year, but a new open-source project is challenging that model with a full-featured PDF suite that runs entirely on your machine.
The project, Stirling PDF, bundles more than 50 tools including merge, split, sign, redact, OCR, compress, and convert functions, essentially covering everything Acrobat typically charges for.
Unlike cloud-based PDF tools, all processing happens locally, meaning files never leave the user’s device. The project has already gained strong traction in the developer community, reaching 78k stars on GitHub and positioning itself as a privacy-first alternative for handling documents.
Repo: Stirling PDF GitHub
Stirling-PDF is designed for individuals, businesses, and developers working with PDFs, addressing the high cost and privacy concerns of traditional PDF software by offering a self-hosted, fully offline alternative.
Early reactions highlight both enthusiasm and practical use cases.
“sounds amazing, another feature i would appreciate is, extract the ocr data into a seperate text file”
said u/Possible-Week-5815
“I came across this a while back and it’s been a game changer for handling my pdf needs. Yes I could do many things separately but having everything all packaged together with an API too has been great – Amazing job @Froooodle !!”
said u/parkercp
“I have been dreaming to find such a gem <3 … being able to manipulate PDF on any of my devices, without the need of installing software everywhere … AND selfhosting it so that my PDF (however sensitive they pay be) are not floating god knows where on the web … SERIOUSLY, THX !!”
said u/acaranta
