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PDF Tinkerer vs Stirling PDF: catalog facts
PDF Tinkerer	Stirling PDF
Free Free and open source under the LGPL-2.1-or-later license.	Freemium Free plan is $0/month with no card required (60+ tools, web/desktop/self-hosted, 500…
Linux	Windows, macOS, Linux, Web, Self-hosted
Creates new PDFs as well as modifying existing ones Open source under LGPL	55+ PDF tools covering signing, converting, merging, editing, OCR and redaction, chained in a stateful workspace with… Runs on Docker, bare metal, Kubernetes or as native desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux
Linux only Small one-person project with little public documentation	Open-core: SSO, external database, Google Drive integration, SAML and audit logs are gated behind paid Team or… Manual server setup needs Java 25+ plus LibreOffice and Tesseract for conversions and OCR
Downloadable app	Self-hosted, Downloadable app, Web application, Hosted service
Open source	Open source
License: LGPL-2.1-or-later	License: MIT
No account needed	No account needed
Works offline	Works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 1, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 20, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.