PDFRaw vs iLovePDF

Pricing, honestly

iLovePDF Premium costs $7 per month, or $48 per year, and that is genuinely cheap for what it unlocks: bigger files, batch processing, the desktop and mobile apps, signature workflows, AI credits, and no ads. Their pricing page shows local currency, so the number you see may differ slightly.

PDFRaw is free, full stop. No account, no watermark, no premium tier waiting behind the tools, and the 100 MB per-file limit applies to everyone equally. That is the whole pricing page.

The structural difference is what the free tier is for. iLovePDF's free tier exists to move you to Premium, which is why limits step up when you register and again when you pay. Our free tier is the product.

Privacy and file handling

Both services process files on their own servers and delete them automatically within two hours, and iLovePDF deserves credit for documenting their side well: ISO 27001 certification, EEA processing, and a clear security page. One nuance worth knowing is that documents signed through their signature product are retained for up to five years, which is a legal requirement of that kind of service rather than a gotcha.

On PDFRaw, every file is deleted two hours after upload, enforced three independent ways, and you can delete it immediately from the result screen. Conversions run on hardware we operate, never through a third-party API. The AI tools are the one exception worth naming: summarize and translate send the document text to a large language model to produce the result, and nothing is retained afterwards or used for training. If that matters to you, every non-AI tool stays entirely on our infrastructure.

We do not run third-party advertising or analytics trackers. An ad-funded free tier necessarily means ad networks watching the pages you use; ours has neither.

Tools and coverage

iLovePDF covers the PDF essentials well: merge, split, compress, convert to and from Office formats, OCR, edit, redact, compare, repair, and a proper signature product. Within PDFs specifically, their editor and signature workflows are more mature than ours.

PDFRaw covers those same PDF basics and then keeps going: 113 tools including image conversion in every direction, audio and video conversion and compression, ebook formats like EPUB, MOBI and AZW3, transcription of audio and video to text, and a QR code designer that runs entirely in your browser. If your week involves more file types than PDF alone, that breadth is the difference between one site and four.

The free tier you actually get

On iLovePDF, an unregistered visitor gets smaller file limits than a registered one, batch limits like two files per compression task, and ads alongside the work. None of that is scandalous; it is a normal freemium ladder, and their free tier does not watermark your output, which is more than many competitors manage.

On PDFRaw there is no ladder to climb. The upload limit is 100 MB whether or not you have an account, every tool is available, and there are no ads. The trade we ask instead is patience with a younger product: we do not yet have their polish everywhere, and we say so in the section above.