Sejda PDF — The Complete Guide: Free Editing of Existing PDF Text, Online and on Desktop
Sejda PDF is one of the few free tools that can edit text already in the file, alongside adding text, images and links and filling and signing forms. It is available as a website and as a program for Windows, macOS and Linux, and it suits fixing a mistake in a document you only received as a PDF.
Sejda PDF
Sejda BV
Browser and desktop PDF editor that edits existing text for free, plus dozens of page, convert and OCR tools within hourly or daily limits.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Editing existing text — correct a number, a date or a sentence inside the document.
- Forms and signing — fill in fields and sign a form.
- Pages — merge, split, crop and reorder.
- Compress and convert — shrink files and convert to and from Office.
- OCR — text recognition on scans.
What is free and what is not
No sign-up is needed. On the web you get up to 3 tasks per hour, documents up to 200 pages and 50 MB, one file per task, OCR up to 10 pages and images up to 5 MB. The desktop program allows 3 tasks per day. Beyond that you need a web week pass or an annual web-and-desktop subscription. Privacy: on the web, files are uploaded to Sejda’s servers and deleted automatically after two hours; the desktop program processes files locally without uploading, so it is the better choice for sensitive documents.
Related tools
For editing existing text with no task quota — PDFgear. For a free Windows toolbox with no limits — PDF24. For open-source splitting and merging — PDFsam Basic.
PDFgear
PDFgear
Free PDF editor with no sign-up and no watermark: edit existing text, OCR, convert, merge and sign.
Get it from the vendor
PDF24 Creator / PDF24 Tools
Geek Software GmbH
Free PDF toolbox: an offline Windows program plus a browser version — merge, split, compress, OCR, convert and a PDF printer.
Get it from the vendor
PDFsam Basic
Sober Lemur
Split, merge, rotate and extract PDF pages — for drawing sets, specifications and submissions.
Get it from the vendor
iLovePDF
iLovePDF S.L.
Popular online PDF toolbox: merge, split, compress, convert, OCR, PDF/A, repair, redact and compare — with free limits.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Excellent for a one-off fix to a document, especially for Linux users. For daily work the hourly and daily quotas are felt very quickly.