Click the Edit PDF tool, drop your PDF file, and you’ll see a preview of every page. Click any text on the page — it becomes editable. Type your replacement, press Enter to confirm, then click “Save edited PDF” when you’re done. The edits are made by covering the original text and drawing your new text on top, so the result is a clean, valid PDF. No conversion to Word required, no signup, no watermark.

Open the Sign PDF tool. You’ll see two ways to create a signature: Draw (use your mouse or finger to draw a signature on a pad) or Type (type your name and it renders in cursive). Once your signature is ready, click anywhere on the PDF preview to place it. You can place the signature on multiple pages, then click “Save signed PDF”. Free alternative to DocuSign and Adobe Sign for personal use.

For most everyday PDF tasks — yes. Folio offers PDF editing, signing, compression, merging, splitting, and more, all free, all in your browser. Adobe Acrobat Pro charges $19.99/month for these features. Folio doesn’t replace Acrobat for advanced enterprise needs (OCR on scanned documents, complex form authoring, encryption certificates), but for the everyday “I need to fix a typo / sign this contract / shrink this PDF” use cases, it’s a complete free replacement.

No. Folio processes every file entirely in your web browser using JavaScript. Your PDFs never leave your device, are never sent over the network, and are never stored on any server. You can verify this by opening your browser’s DevTools → Network tab and watching while you process a file — you’ll see zero outgoing requests with file data.

Yes, all PDF tools on Folio are free with no signup required. Because everything runs in your browser, we have no server costs that scale with usage. The site is supported by a small number of non-intrusive ads. There are no file size limits imposed by us, only by your device’s available memory.

Use the Add Text tool. Drop your PDF, click anywhere on the page preview, and start typing. You can choose font size (6–72pt) and color (black, rust, blue, red). Press Enter to confirm, Escape to cancel. Add as many text blocks as you need across as many pages as you need, then save. Perfect for filling out non-fillable PDF forms.

Click the Merge tool, drag and drop two or more PDF files, arrange them in the order you want using the up/down buttons, then click “Merge PDFs”. The combined PDF will download automatically. The whole process happens in your browser — no upload required.

Open the Compress tool and pick the “High” quality preset — this typically reduces file size by 60% with near-original visual quality, perfect for email attachments. For more aggressive compression (90%+), use “Low” — it’s still readable and great for archival. The tool tests multiple compression strategies and never makes your file larger than the original.

Yes. The Split PDF tool lets you extract specific pages or page ranges. Enter ranges like “1-3,5,7-9” to pick exactly the pages you want into a new PDF.

Folio works on all modern browsers — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Brave, and Arc — on desktop and mobile. JavaScript must be enabled. We test against the latest two versions of each browser.

Folio’s text editor works on PDFs with selectable text (PDFs created from Word, Pages, web pages, etc.). Scanned PDFs (which are essentially images) need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) before text can be edited. A quick test: try selecting text in your PDF reader. If you can highlight individual words, Folio’s editor will work. If selecting just makes a rectangle over the whole page, you have a scanned PDF.

Folio’s main differentiator is privacy: nothing leaves your computer. Most online PDF tools require uploading your file to their server, where it’s processed and held temporarily. For sensitive documents — contracts, IDs, medical records, financial statements — that’s a real privacy concern. Folio sidesteps it entirely by doing the work locally. There are also no daily limits, no signup walls, and no upgrade prompts.