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Stirling PDF vs PDFsam Visual: catalog facts
Stirling PDF	PDFsam Visual
Freemium Free plan is $0/month with no card required (60+ tools, web/desktop/self-hosted, 500…	Freemium Several tools are free; premium tools need a subscription or perpetual license after a…
Windows, macOS, Linux, Web, Self-hosted	Windows
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	Thumbnail-based page organizing, extracting and splitting More than 25 PDF tools in one desktop app
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	Most visual page tools require a paid license Not open source, unlike PDFsam Basic
Self-hosted, Downloadable app, Web application, Hosted service	Downloadable app
Open source	Closed source
License: MIT	License: Proprietary
No account needed	Not stated if an account is 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.