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Stirling PDF vs PDF Tinkerer: catalog facts
Stirling PDF	PDF Tinkerer
Freemium Free plan is $0/month with no card required (60+ tools, web/desktop/self-hosted, 500…	Free Free and open source under the LGPL-2.1-or-later license.
Windows, macOS, Linux, Web, Self-hosted	Linux
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	Creates new PDFs as well as modifying existing ones Open source under LGPL
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	Linux only Small one-person project with little public documentation
Self-hosted, Downloadable app, Web application, Hosted service	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: MIT	License: LGPL-2.1-or-later
No account needed	No account needed
Works offline	Works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 20, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 1, 2026

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