Hi folks!
I’m the creator of BentoPDF. It is an open source PDF toolkit that runs entirely in your browser. Your documents stay private, by design.
BentoPDF started as a small side project, but over time it has grown into something much bigger. With our latest major update, BentoPDF now includes 100+ tools, all running fully client-side.
You can do the basics like merge PDFs(while preserving bookmarks), split documents, extract or delete pages, reorder files, rotate pages, and compress PDFs. Thee are also some advanced tools.
You can edit and annotate PDFs directly in the browser: highlight text, add comments, draw shapes, insert images, fill(including XFA) and create forms, manage bookmarks, generate tables of contents, redact, add headers, footers, watermarks, and page numbers.
BentoPDF also supports an extensive range of file conversions. You can convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Pages, CSV, RTF, EPUB, MOBI, comic book formats, and many more into PDFs, and also convert PDFs back into Word, Excel, images, Markdown, CSV, JSON, and plain text.
For images, BentoPDF supports a massive variety of formats, including HEIC, WebP, SVG, PSD, JP2, and and aalso other formats such as EPUB, CBR/CBZ. You can convert images to PDFs, extract images from PDFs in their original format, or rasterize PDFs with full DPI control.
There are also organization and optimization tools: OCR, PDF/A conversion, booklet creation, N-up layouts, page division, attachment management, layer (OCG) editing, metadata inspection and editing, repair tools, and advanced compression algorithms that rival commercial solutions.
The latest update also includes AI ready extraction tools to export PDFs to structured JSON, extract tables as CSV/Markdown/JSON, and prepare PDFs for RAG and LLM workflows.
All of this works entirely in the browser, without accounts, uploads, or tracking.
This is my first post here and I hope you like it. Any feedback or feature requests are appreciated. Thank you.
Github Link: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf
Thanks for this! I saw this post yesterday, and decided to check it out. I installed it locally on my laptop, and am evaluating it for work. If I recommend it for use, we’ll get a license :).
Since the idea would be to replace Adobe for non-Pro (and maybe some Pro accounts), ease of use for low-tech users is at the front of my mind. Not being able to “set as default” for PDFs is not ideal, but I understand the limitation comes from running in the browser. Is there some way to open the PDF, and then choose which tool to use? Rather than how it seems now: choose the tool/function, then upload the PDF.
In next week we are going to be releasing Desktop apps, so you can download it and then set as default viewer
Saw this as an option in TrueNAS earlier and will probably be standing this up when I get home today. I was curious about the difference between this and Stirling, but that appears to have been answered. Thank you for what you do and I’ll definitely give it a try.
Some features seem to limit the working area to only the middle part of the browser. For example, the Multi Tool use 100% width but the Editor uses 33% only. Would love to see all features making full use of the screen size.
There is a use full width toggle which you can find under preferences in setting button in the search bar. I will make this the defult in next release
Perfect! Honestly though, I would expect the gears icon to appear in the top right corner, not in the search bar😅
Yeah I couldn’t find a good place to put it lol
The day I can digitally sign PDFs from this, it’d be the PDF editor. You’re doing the Lord’s work, thank you very much for this!
It’s actually coming up in next release (: You will be able to sign with PKCS12, PFX and PEM certificates. And also validate them
What about PGP ?
yes that too
Well now I am even more interested in it.
Oh, wow, thank you very much for this!!
Are there ways to use it via an API? In particular I’d love to be able to programmatically submit a Word or Excel document and receive a PDF back
As its fully client side, it doesn’t expose any APIS. HOwever, I am writing an API only version of bentopdf on Rust
Unsure it fits your scenario but you could use VBA. In my case, we collect data via Excel then they get populated into a Word report template, and finally export to PDF for project delivery purposes, all automated using VBA.
Agreed. I spent a bit of time writing out a script for similar functionality for one of our business units, but I never was able to figure out how to convert excel sheets to a PDF to be able to merge them in the allotted time, so it just doesn’t support them lol.
But I can see why it wouldn’t have an API, since the whole deal is it stays in your browser, and an API would mean sending the files to the server.
Maybe there’s some way to use selenium or something like that so that it stays local.
My work processes PDFs from government sites, filling them out for end users automatically. Would be cool if the API could do this somehow. Parse fields, and let you put text into them.
a small question, if I may.
When I worked in technical support for a popular phone brand a lifetime ago, I had to make clickable “navigatable” pdfs. Create empty objects around apps and settings so that technicians could help clients without having access to their phone or device with current OS update. I would update mine and take screen shots then convert those with clickable objects to switch to the correct page to act as a sudo phone/tablet. Is this something that BentoPDF can do?
Currently there’s no such feature
Can it also redact text from documents without allowing you to just copy and paste it back out again?
Asking for a friend.
It is a civic duty to redact certain papers incorrectly.
Certain files, involving a certain island.
Yes! It performs true redaction. You can find it in the editor tool
@Blackmist@feddit.uk works for the NCA. LOL
lol
Great project. I like the 1-star reviews complaining about the lack of advertising and tracking.
Lol wait seriously? Surely those are a joke.
haha thanks
You’re doing the lords work my dude. There are not enough ways to thank you for your work
(:
What I would love to see is batch processing of mapped form fields from a PDF template, e.g. to fill out training certificate template pdfs with name, date, company, and instructor from a given CSV file, add a signature and print it. Is something like that possible? 🙂
We currently use nodered, python and reportlab and I‘m looking to somewht simplify the process :)
That’s interesting. I will see what I can do
Awesome, thanks :)
I’ve used it before for a job application! I needed to send them sensitive data. Tysm!
Great intuitive UI, does what it says, and it’s fast. 5/5
Thanks!
Thank you so much. Why did you start this project, which certainly involves a lot of work? ( aka why are you so cool?)
Thank you! It started off as a simple tool as I wanted to merge PDFs visually by applying page ranges and I couldn’t find any offline tool for that. I happened to then post it on reddit, and people asked me to open source it. After which I kept adding features on request and here we are 😂
You’re great for making this so everyone can use it. Thank you
(:
I’m stoked to give it a try. I left my last PDF application because they injected AI into it. So I’ve been shopping around a little. I’ve been using Okular, but it’s really limited, even as a viewer. This looks awesome. Nicely done! I hope you keep at it!
Thank you. You can also use the editor has a viewer
Thank you so much for this. We just started using it at our school. We were using StirlingPDF, but they went open core 🫤. Personally, I like that there is no auth, it keeps it simple.
That’s great to know. Thank you!
Been using this for a while now, wife and kids are also very pleased with it. Easy to use and great layout, thank you so much!
wow, that’s great to know
Does each user have their own account? Or can anyone and everyone see all the pdfs? Or are the pdfs only stored for the duration of the browser session?
There are no accounts or signup. All the processing happens locally in your browser. In fact, you can even use it offline once the page is loaded, and only you have access to the PDFs
Everything local, I assume, means no upload? My dad does house inspections and so there’s like 4 or 5 pdf forms he fills out all the time. If he were using this, would he upload the template every time, or could he upload it once and then fill it out multiple times?
I assume also that it wouldn’t keep a history of each finished file, and it’s all ephemeral?
It never keeps any history, the TTL for the document is only as long as you are not done with the processing. There is no template system now. However I am planning to include a JSON based templating system which you can upload once and save and can be reused to auto fill forms
