TL;DR: Upload a PDF and click anywhere on the page to add text, highlights, white-out boxes, or rectangles — then download the edited version.
Edit PDF online for free — modify text, images, and content directly inside your PDF. Add new text blocks, replace images, and make changes without converting to Word first. Full-featured PDF editor with no watermarks.
Like the rest of the 214-tool PrivaTools suite, Edit PDF is MIT-licensed and self-hostable. The public demo deletes your file as soon as the response leaves the server — verifiable in the open-source codebase on GitHub.
Edit PDF online for free — modify text, images, and content directly inside your PDF. Add new text blocks, replace images, and make changes without converting to Word first. Full-featured PDF editor with no watermarks. Use it when you need a quick, private, no-account way to handle a pdf in the browser, or when you want an auditable open-source alternative to iLovePDF, Smallpdf, Adobe Acrobat, PDF24, and Sejda. The page at /tool/edit-pdf is designed for one clear job: upload or provide the input, choose only the options that matter, and download the result without creating an account or passing through a sales funnel.
PDF operations that need server-side libraries run inside the PrivaTools container and return a fresh download; browser-only PDF helpers stay on-device. Temporary input and output files are not used for analytics, model training, advertising profiles, or product telemetry. The public demo uses anonymous page-view analytics only; file bytes, extracted text, filenames, passwords, signatures, and generated results are outside that analytics path. If your organization needs stricter controls, you can self-host all 214 PrivaTools utilities and keep processing on your own infrastructure.
Before running Edit PDF, confirm that the source file opens correctly and that you have permission to process it. Keep an untouched original, run one operation at a time when quality matters, and use Pipeline when you want repeatable multi-step output. For sensitive material, review the downloaded result before sharing it. For large files, give the browser time to finish the download and avoid refreshing the page mid-run. If a password, damaged upload, unsupported codec, or malformed document blocks processing, PrivaTools returns a plain-language error so you can pick the next recovery step instead of guessing.
Edit PDF is intentionally narrow: it does one pdf task and hands the result back as a normal download. That makes the output easy to inspect, rename, archive, attach to email, or feed into another tool. If you need a repeatable workflow, save the page, bookmark a Pipeline recipe, or self-host the API so the same steps can run from internal scripts. The interface avoids accounts and cloud folders on purpose: the safest default for private files is to process only the current request, return the result, and leave long-term storage under your control.
Edit PDF runs in any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS — there is nothing to install, no extension to add, and no desktop app to keep updated. Because the interface is a single page, you can bookmark it, send the link to a colleague, or open it on a phone and get the same result you would on a laptop. There are no watermarks stamped onto your output, no sign-in wall before the download, and no paid tier that unlocks the “real” version later — the Edit PDF you see is the complete tool. For teams that would rather keep everything in-house, the same endpoint ships in the MIT-licensed, self-hostable build, so you can run it behind your own firewall with identical behaviour and no outbound calls. That combination — instant in the browser for individuals, fully self-hostable for organizations — is what keeps a private file genuinely private from upload to download.
The editor supports adding new text, shapes, highlights, and freehand drawings on top of the page. Direct editing of existing text glyphs requires re-authoring the document because PDF stores text as positioned glyphs, not as flowing paragraphs.
Yes. When you save, annotations are flattened into the PDF so they appear identically in every viewer (Adobe Reader, Preview, Chrome, mobile readers) and cannot be removed by toggling annotation visibility.
Text boxes, freehand pen, highlighter, rectangles, circles, lines, and arrows. You can set color, opacity, line thickness, and font size for each. Move and resize freely before saving.
Yes. The PDF is held in temporary per-request storage inside an isolated Docker container only for the duration of your edit session — both input and output are unlinked the moment your download begins. No copy remains in permanent storage, logs, or backups. The editor code is open source under MIT for verification.
500 MB per file with no daily or monthly quota. There is no page-count cap; very long PDFs render page-by-page as you scroll.
No. No account, no email, no sign-up. The editor loads directly in your browser; the privacy guarantees come from the architecture, not from a user profile.
Free with no daily limit (PDFescape caps free use at 10 MB / 100 pages, Adobe requires a paid subscription for full editing), no account required, and the entire editor is open source so you can self-host it. We don't store your file or send it to any third-party API.
See how PrivaTools compares to iLovePDF, Smallpdf, Adobe Acrobat, and other free PDF tools.