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PDFsam Basic vs Stirling PDF: catalog facts
PDFsam Basic	Stirling PDF
Freemium PDFsam Basic is free and open source under the AGPL 3.0. PDFsam Enhanced and Visual are…	Freemium Free plan is $0/month with no card required (60+ tools, web/desktop/self-hosted, 500…
Windows, macOS, Linux	Windows, macOS, Linux, Web, Self-hosted
Batch split, merge, rotate, extract and alternate-mix operations Completely offline; files never leave the machine	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
No text editing, form filling or OCR in the free edition JavaFX interface feels unlike a native app on every platform	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: AGPL-3.0	License: MIT
No account needed	No account needed
Works offline	Works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 21, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 20, 2026

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