Can it also redact text from documents without allowing you to just copy and paste it back out again?
Asking for a friend.
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
789 points (99.4% liked)
Selfhosted
54004 readers
1037 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Hi folks!
I’m the creator of BentoPDF. It is an open source PDF toolkit that runs entirely in your browser. Your documents stay private, by design.
BentoPDF started as a small side project, but over time it has grown into something much bigger. With our latest major update, BentoPDF now includes 100+ tools, all running fully client-side.
You can do the basics like merge PDFs(while preserving bookmarks), split documents, extract or delete pages, reorder files, rotate pages, and compress PDFs. Thee are also some advanced tools.
You can edit and annotate PDFs directly in the browser: highlight text, add comments, draw shapes, insert images, fill(including XFA) and create forms, manage bookmarks, generate tables of contents, redact, add headers, footers, watermarks, and page numbers.
BentoPDF also supports an extensive range of file conversions. You can convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Pages, CSV, RTF, EPUB, MOBI, comic book formats, and many more into PDFs, and also convert PDFs back into Word, Excel, images, Markdown, CSV, JSON, and plain text.
For images, BentoPDF supports a massive variety of formats, including HEIC, WebP, SVG, PSD, JP2, and and aalso other formats such as EPUB, CBR/CBZ. You can convert images to PDFs, extract images from PDFs in their original format, or rasterize PDFs with full DPI control.
There are also organization and optimization tools: OCR, PDF/A conversion, booklet creation, N-up layouts, page division, attachment management, layer (OCG) editing, metadata inspection and editing, repair tools, and advanced compression algorithms that rival commercial solutions.
The latest update also includes AI ready extraction tools to export PDFs to structured JSON, extract tables as CSV/Markdown/JSON, and prepare PDFs for RAG and LLM workflows.
All of this works entirely in the browser, without accounts, uploads, or tracking.
This is my first post here and I hope you like it. Any feedback or feature requests are appreciated. Thank you.
Github Link: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf
Yes! It performs true redaction. You can find it in the editor tool
It is a civic duty to redact certain papers incorrectly.
Certain files, involving a certain island.
@Blackmist@feddit.uk works for the NCA. LOL
lol
I use this already. Works great. Thanks for your hard work on this.
Glad it helped!
Same.
(:
Great project. I like the 1-star reviews complaining about the lack of advertising and tracking.
haha thanks
load more comments
(1 replies)
Thank you so much. Why did you start this project, which certainly involves a lot of work? ( aka why are you so cool?)
Thank you! It started off as a simple tool as I wanted to merge PDFs visually by applying page ranges and I couldn't find any offline tool for that. I happened to then post it on reddit, and people asked me to open source it. After which I kept adding features on request and here we are 😂
load more comments
(2 replies)
You're doing the lords work my dude. There are not enough ways to thank you for your work
load more comments
(1 replies)
Been using this for a while now, wife and kids are also very pleased with it. Easy to use and great layout, thank you so much!
wow, that's great to know
Does each user have their own account? Or can anyone and everyone see all the pdfs? Or are the pdfs only stored for the duration of the browser session?
There are no accounts or signup. All the processing happens locally in your browser. In fact, you can even use it offline once the page is loaded, and only you have access to the PDFs
load more comments
(2 replies)
I've used Stirling pdf in the past. How does it compare?
Not sure, as I haven't used Stirling and at the same time I didn't make it to compete with other tools. Hence I never mention its better than xyz tool either on our github or website. Users would have to do their own due diligence in this case. However it does have the best bookmark tool in the market(yes, better than adobe acrobat) and also a form creator tool, among others, which you can't find in other OS tools.
I understand and I wasn't looking for a "better or worst"assessment. I'll give it a try even if I haven't needed to manipulate pdfs. Always nice to add to the toolset.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Honestly, I think this is just one where you try it for yourself. The compose file is about 4 lines long, I had the whole thing up and running in about 30 seconds (OK, 45; I forgot a port was already in use and had to redeploy).
So far my one big complaint would be that the self-hosted version replicates the entire website, including all of the "Why choose Bento PDF" and "Try now" and so on. It'd be nice to just have the tools right there when I load it up. Other than that, well, it looks cool, I'll know more once I actually try out the available options.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I've used it before for a job application! I needed to send them sensitive data. Tysm!
Great intuitive UI, does what it says, and it's fast. 5/5
Thanks!
Thank you so much for this. We just started using it at our school. We were using StirlingPDF, but they went open core 🫤. Personally, I like that there is no auth, it keeps it simple.
load more comments
(1 replies)
What I would love to see is batch processing of mapped form fields from a PDF template, e.g. to fill out training certificate template pdfs with name, date, company, and instructor from a given CSV file, add a signature and print it. Is something like that possible? 🙂
We currently use nodered, python and reportlab and I‘m looking to somewht simplify the process :)
load more comments
(1 replies)
The day I can digitally sign PDFs from this, it'd be the PDF editor. You're doing the Lord's work, thank you very much for this!
It's actually coming up in next release (: You will be able to sign with PKCS12, PFX and PEM certificates. And also validate them
load more comments
(1 replies)
Are there ways to use it via an API? In particular I'd love to be able to programmatically submit a Word or Excel document and receive a PDF back
Agreed. I spent a bit of time writing out a script for similar functionality for one of our business units, but I never was able to figure out how to convert excel sheets to a PDF to be able to merge them in the allotted time, so it just doesn't support them lol.
But I can see why it wouldn't have an API, since the whole deal is it stays in your browser, and an API would mean sending the files to the server.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
From just a quick look so far, it seems really versatile. Thanks for the work you’ve put into this!
Thanks! Hope you like it
I had no clue this existed!!! Thanks for sharing.
Would you say that BentoPDF is an alternative to Adobe Acrobat and/or Bluebeam Revu?
I use those for my job, but it'd be nice to have a FLOSS alternative as a backup
It has almost all the features of Acrobat except for the text editing, which i will be adding soon
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
I use this at home and I’m thinking of setting this up at work, to prevent my colleagues from using shady PDF-sites, for merging or splitting PDF-files.
How does the license work for internal use at a company, by it employees?
Hello and thank you. There is a one time life time commercial licence that comes for $49 and can be used by unlimited number of users (:
It's not important but I guess it doesn't support auth? I've only got time to do a quick glance right now so I might have missed something.
I think a lot of people's use cases might be to integrate with other tools in their self-host stack like Authentik (could be solved by adding proxy auth if nothing exists natively) and Nextcloud or other filesharing/storing solutions.
If there aren't any capabilities like that then it could be food for thought for expansion. Otherwise great job! Right now it's still an upgrade from various shady PDF tool websites where you still have to download the PDF from your server to upload and process the files.
auth is out of the scope of this project currently. but yes it will be a good addition which i am thinking to add in future updates
You can just have things be out of scope. It's really okay!
Thanks for the work you've put into this.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
what is the reason to put that tool into a browser? if i use the thing on my private computer, it increases complexity compared to a local installation (not an issue for many ppl here, but for my grandma surely). if i use it on a corporate environment, wouldn't more employees use it if it was the default PDF viewer on their managed device?
what did i miss?
Yes, as arthor mentioned it is supposed to be a self hosted tool. But since it's client side and just a bunch of static files in the end, I will soon be porting it for all major platforms as an installable using Tauri
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›