About Slate

Slate is a free collection of 21 PDF tools that run entirely in your web browser. There are no accounts, no uploads, and no limits. Your files never leave your device — not even for a millisecond.

Why we built it

Almost every "free online PDF" service works by uploading your documents to their servers. For files that often contain contracts, IDs, and financial data, that's a privacy trade-off most people don't realize they're making. We wanted tools that are just as convenient but keep your files on your own device.

We also noticed that most "free" tools aren't really free — they limit you to 2 tasks per day, cap file sizes at 5 MB, or lock useful features behind a subscription. Slate has none of those restrictions.

How it works

Slate uses modern browser technology — WebAssembly and the File APIs — to read, edit, and save PDFs locally. Your file is loaded into your browser's memory, processed on your machine, and handed straight back to you. Nothing is transmitted to us. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and most tools keep working.

This also makes Slate faster than upload-based tools. There's no server round-trip, no queue, no waiting. Even large PDFs process in seconds because the bottleneck is your device's CPU, not a shared server.

How it's free

Slate is funded by unobtrusive display advertising, not subscriptions or selling data. Because the tools cost us almost nothing to run (your device does the work), we can keep every feature free for everyone.

The tools

Slate covers the full range of everyday PDF tasks:

• Organize: Merge, split, reorder pages, remove pages, extract pages
• Convert: JPG to PDF, PNG to PDF, PDF to JPG, PDF to PNG, PDF to text
• Edit: Rotate, crop, resize, watermark, add page numbers, edit metadata
• Optimize: Compress, convert to grayscale, repair
• Security: Unlock PDF

How Slate compares

Compared to tools like Smallpdf or ILovePDF, Slate's key difference is that it never uploads your files. See the full feature comparison to understand what each tool actually does with your documents.

Press & linking

Writing about PDF tools or online privacy? Visit our press page for brand assets, suggested link snippets, and key facts about Slate.