iLovePDF

iLovePDF is a broad online PDF toolkit — merge, split, compress, convert to and from Office formats, OCR, redaction (including a guided “smart redact”), document compare, form filling and signing — with desktop and mobile apps alongside the web tools. Premium is EUR 5 per month billed annually, with a free tier for occasional use.

Its editor is the thing to be clear about. iLovePDF’s own tool page describes editing a PDF as “adding text, shapes, comments and highlights”, and the documentation describes placing Text, Image or Shape elements onto a page. That is an overlay editor: it cannot change the words already set in the document. The supported route is converting to Word, editing there, and converting back, which loses layout fidelity on anything complex.

Everything else lines up well against Acrobat, and redaction and OCR are included at a price Adobe charges five times over. The other caveat is the free tier’s funding model — the consent banner declares well over a hundred advertising vendors, which sits awkwardly with a privacy-led reason for leaving a US vendor.

ILOVEPDF, S.L. is a Spanish company registered in the Mercantile Registry of Barcelona with tax number B-66921552, at C/ Sabino de Arana 60, 08028 Barcelona. Its General Terms and Conditions name that entity, apply Spanish law, and give exclusive jurisdiction to the courts of Barcelona; the privacy policy names the same company as controller.

Ownership is a privately held Spanish group with no outside funding rounds on record. Founder Marc Umberto Grossi Sas chairs the board alongside Juan Eguiguren Istuany, and Hans Bärfuss — who founded PDF Tools AG in Switzerland — was recorded as a partner in August 2026. A family holding company, Monredos SL, is linked through a 2025 spin-off.

The company reports processing more than 16 million documents a day and holds ISO 27001 certification. Spanish S.L. accounts are not published free of charge, so revenue and headcount are self-reported.