Rohman
You scanned the lease at 300 DPI because the fine print on page 14, the renewal clause, is the part that actually matters. Forty pages later you had a file worth reading twice. You dragged it onto iLovePDF's OCR tool so you could search it and copy that clause into an email. The file was 18 MB. The tool turned it away before it started: free accounts get 15 MB per OCR job, one file at a time.
Nobody made you wait an hour. Nobody made you watch a clock. iLovePDF just asked you to make the file smaller, or pay.
What iLovePDF is
iLovePDF started in a study in Barcelona in 2010, founded by Marco Grossi (ilovepdf.com/help/about). It has never taken outside funding and is still privately held, with roughly 72 employees as of mid-2026 (Crunchbase). That's a real bootstrapped story, not a venture-backed growth chart.
It's also enormous. Semrush counts 250.21 million visits in July 2026 alone, dwarfing a competitor like Sejda's 5.7 million. iLovePDF's own pricing page claims "16.5 million documents processed every day" and calls itself the "#1 most-used online PDF software worldwide." Whether it's actually first is a marketing claim; the traffic behind the claim is not.
The reputation holds up under independent scrutiny, too. Trustpilot has it at 4.9 out of 5 across 13,393 reviews. Capterra puts it at 4.7 out of 5 across 1,746 reviews. Those aren't small samples a marketing team could quietly pad. A lot of people use this tool and walk away satisfied.
The free tier, tool by tool
Sejda gives you one number to remember: three tasks an hour. Foxit gives you a countdown on a trial. iLovePDF's pricing page gives you a spreadsheet. Every tool carries its own file-size cap and its own files-per-task cap on the free Basic plan, and none of them match:
- Merge PDF: 100 MB, up to 25 files per task
- Compress PDF: 200 MB, 2 files per task
- OCR PDF and the Office conversions (Word, Excel, PowerPoint): 15 MB, 1 file per task
- PDF to JPG: 25 MB, 2 files per task
- Image to PDF: 40 MB, 20 files per task
- Sign PDF: 50 MB, 3 files per task
- Redact PDF and Compare PDF: 400 MB, 1 to 2 files per task
Premium clears out most of this. Most tools jump to a 4 GB cap and anywhere from 10 to 500 files per task. Not all of them, though. Edit PDF stays at 100 MB and 1 file per task on every plan, Basic through Business. Sign PDF stays at 50 MB on every plan too; paying only buys two extra files per batch, from 3 up to 5. Redact and Compare keep their already-generous 400 MB ceiling and never move at all. Someone at iLovePDF decided a handful of tools just don't get bigger, no matter what you're paying for.
What iLovePDF does well
Credit where it's due. Twenty-five-plus tools live under one roof here, not the six or seven a typical free site bothers with (ilovepdf.com/help/about). There's a genuine desktop app for offline work (ilovepdf.com/desktop), mobile apps that open files straight out of Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and SharePoint, a REST API for anyone who wants PDF processing wired into their own product, and iLoveSign, a full e-signature workflow with an audit trail, something OxygenPDF doesn't attempt. If your day involves PDFs for eight hours and you want one account that follows you from a laptop to a phone to a build pipeline, iLovePDF's breadth is a legitimate reason to pay for it.
Where your file actually goes
Every one of those tools works the same way underneath: your file leaves your device, lands on iLovePDF's servers, gets processed, and comes back. iLovePDF says it deletes files "automatically and permanently... within two hours of being processed" (ilovepdf.com/help/security), holds ISO/IEC 27001:2017 certification, and is GDPR compliant as a Barcelona-based company. Signed documents through iLoveSign are the one exception, kept longer under separate terms, because a signature has to be provable after the fact.
We found no public breach on iLovePDF's record, unlike Foxit's 328,549-user leak in 2019. Worth saying plainly. Still, two hours is not zero. Premium accounts get to choose which of 11 regions process a file, against 7 on Basic, which only matters once you're already thinking about where a document is allowed to travel.
Premium pricing in 2026
Independent listings on Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice converge on the same figure: $9 a month, flat rate, per user, with a discount for paying annually. Business is quote-only, aimed at teams past 25 seats with SSO and a dedicated account manager.
$9 a month buys real headroom: the 4 GB caps, the higher file counts, desktop and API access. It does not buy a bigger Edit PDF, Sign PDF, Redact, or Compare limit. Those hold steady regardless of plan.
The batch-processing catch
Sejda states its wall in one sentence: three tasks, then wait. iLovePDF doesn't give you a sentence. Its pricing page lists "Batch processing: Limited" for the free tier next to "Tools: Limited tools," no single number attached. The real limit is the sum of dozens of separate per-tool caps, discovered one rejected upload at a time. That's more honest in one way, since there's no clock counting down while you think, and vaguer in another. You don't find the wall until you walk straight into it.
What pushes someone to search "iLovePDF alternative"
The moments repeat themselves:
- A scanned contract lands at 18 MB and OCR wants it under 15.
- Thirty files need merging and the free cap tops out at 25.
- A folder of client invoices needs converting one at a time, because Office conversions cap out at a single file per task on Basic.
- Someone rereads the two-hour deletion policy and remembers exactly what's inside the PDF they were about to upload.
None of that is an edge case. It's what ordinary PDF work looks like once a document is bigger than a coupon.
Where OxygenPDF sits
OxygenPDF runs every tool inside your browser tab, compiled to WebAssembly. There's no upload, so there's no file-size table to memorize and no two-hour window to trust. /tools/ocr-pdf reads an 18 MB scan the same way it reads an 800 KB one. /tools/merge-pdf doesn't count files against a quota. /tools/edit-pdf and /tools/sign-pdf don't hold a size cap flat while everything else around them scales up. /tools/redact-pdf strips the underlying text out, not just a black rectangle drawn over it.
What we don't have is iLovePDF's breadth: no desktop installer, no mobile app, no API, no e-signature workflow with a legal audit trail. If that's what your work needs, $9 a month for a service with a 4.9 on Trustpilot is a fair trade, not a trap. If what you need is to OCR one scan, merge one folder, or sign one form without wondering where the file just went, that's a browser tab, not a subscription.
The narrow point
iLovePDF earned its scale honestly. Bootstrapped since 2010, no funding round propping it up, a quarter-billion visits a month, and a Trustpilot score most software companies would kill for. That's a company that built something people genuinely want to use, and some of its free-tier caps (400 MB for Redact and Compare) are more generous than tools that charge for the privilege.
The remaining caps exist because the model requires them. A server has to meter what it processes somehow, one file-size limit at a time, however clearly that gets disclosed on a pricing page. A browser tab doesn't meter anything, because there's no server counting in the first place. Try /tools/merge-pdf or /tools/ocr-pdf and see what's different: nothing to wait for, nothing leaving the tab. For the same trade-off from a different angle, the Sejda breakdown covers the cloud-PDF pattern this post is really about.
