Toolsly vs iLovePDF: Side-by-side comparison
May 19, 2026 · Toolsly
How Toolsly compares to iLovePDF across price, privacy, tool count, file-size limits, and ads.
Why people compare them
iLovePDF is the household name for online PDF tools — combine, split, compress, convert. It's been around since 2010 and processes millions of files a day. Toolsly is newer and takes a different approach: everything runs in your browser instead of uploading to a remote server.
If you're choosing between them, the right question isn't 'which is better' — it's 'which trade-off fits this file'.
The headline differences
| Toolsly | iLovePDF | |
|---|---|---|
| Files processed on | Your browser | Their server |
| Files uploaded? | No (for almost every tool) | Yes |
| Daily file limit (free tier) | None | 1 task at a time, ~25 MB cap |
| Watermarks | None | None |
| Account required | No | No for basic, yes for premium |
| Price | Free | Free tier + €4–6/mo Premium |
| Ads | None | Yes on free tier |
| Open source | No (yet) | No |
| Tool count | 230+ | ~25 |
Where Toolsly wins
Privacy. This is the big one. When you upload a PDF to iLovePDF, the file lives on their servers for ~2 hours per their stated policy. For most people that's fine. For a tax return, a signed NDA, or your passport scan, it's a real concern. Toolsly does the conversion in your browser tab — the file is read into memory, processed, and the result is offered as a download. Nothing is sent anywhere.
No limits. iLovePDF's free tier limits you to one task at a time and ~25 MB per file. Bigger files require a paid plan. Toolsly's only limit is your browser's memory budget (~2 GB), which is fine for most documents.
Way more tools. iLovePDF focuses on PDFs and a few image conversions. Toolsly covers PDFs, images (HEIC, AVIF, WebP, TIFF — every format), audio (MP3/WAV/FLAC/OGG/AAC), video (MP4/WebM/MKV/MOV — with downscale-to-1080p built in), Mermaid diagrams, payment-card utilities, color tools, code formatters, JSON utilities, and more. Browse the full catalog.
Where iLovePDF wins
Scanned PDFs. Server-side OCR. We don't do OCR in-browser today — pdf-to-text only works on PDFs that already have a text layer.
Speed on very large files. Their servers are faster than your laptop for 200+ MB PDFs. For a 50-page legal brief, the difference is 8 seconds vs 90 seconds.
OCR-related workflows. Searchable-PDF creation, text recognition in scanned images, etc.
Which to pick
- Sensitive document → Toolsly. Don't upload it.
- Hundred-page scanned contract that needs OCR → iLovePDF or Adobe Acrobat.
- Quick PDF merge / split / rotate → Either. Toolsly is usually faster because there's no upload roundtrip.
- Convert PDF to Word / DOCX → Toolsly's pdf-to-docx does the job for text-heavy PDFs.
- Compress PDF → Either works. Toolsly's pdf-compress re-rasterizes pages; iLovePDF has a few more compression algorithms.
The PDF tools Toolsly ships
- Merge PDFs
- Split PDF
- Rotate pages
- Delete pages
- Extract pages
- Reorder pages
- Add watermark
- Add page numbers
- Compress
- Edit metadata
- PDF → Word
- PDF → images
- PDF → JPG
- Images → PDF
All free, all in-browser, no upload.
Related tools
Frequently asked questions
- Is Toolsly really free?
- Yes — no account, no daily limits, no watermarks, no ads. The site is supported by being lean: client-side processing means we don't pay for compute per file.
- What's the maximum file size?
- Whatever your browser can fit in memory — typically up to ~2 GB. For really big PDFs (500+ MB), server-side tools like iLovePDF will be faster.
- Does Toolsly do OCR?
- Not yet. If your PDF is a scanned image with no text layer, our PDF→Word / PDF→Text tools will return empty. For OCR, iLovePDF or Adobe Acrobat are better choices today.
- Can I trust that files aren't uploaded?
- Open DevTools → Network tab and watch as you convert a file. For all of our client-side tools you'll see zero outgoing requests with your file. The source is open for inspection.