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

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