An iLovePDF Alternative Where 'Deleted in 2 Hours' Never Applies
iLovePDF is probably the most recognisable PDF site on the web, and its privacy policy is more specific than most of its competitors'. That specificity is worth reading closely, because it tells you exactly what kind of promise you are being given — and what kind you are not.
What their policy actually says
Three statements from iLovePDF's own legal pages, as published in August 2026:
- Files you upload and process are encrypted and deleted from our servers within 2 hours.
- iLovePDF does not access, use, analyze or store any processed data.
- All files uploaded to iLovePDF are encrypted using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
Taken at face value that is a good policy, and there is no reason here to suggest iLovePDF fails to honour it. But notice the shape of it. Each sentence is a commitment about what happens to your file after it arrives on their infrastructure. The word doing the work in all three is uploaded.
A policy is a promise plus an operational process, and the things that break it are rarely malice. They are a misconfigured storage bucket, a debug log that captured more than it should, a backup snapshot that outlives the two-hour window, a support engineer with broad production access. None of those require anyone at iLovePDF to have acted in bad faith. They only require your file to have been there.
The free tier, in numbers
iLovePDF's published free-tier limits vary by tool. These are from their pricing comparison in August 2026 — check them yourself, since they move:
| iLovePDF (free) | PDF Goat 24 | |
|---|---|---|
| File size, most tools | 100 MB | Bounded by your device's memory |
| Compress PDF | 200 MB | Same |
| PDF to JPG | 25 MB | Same |
| Image to PDF | 40 MB | Same |
| Merge tasks | 25 | No limit |
| Compress tasks | 2 | No limit |
| Where the file is processed | iLovePDF's servers | Your browser tab |
| Retention | Deleted within 2 hours | Never uploaded |
| Ads | Yes on the free tier | None |
| Account required | No | No |
Premium lifts the caps to 4 GB and adds desktop and mobile apps, ad-free browsing and AI credits. Pricing is shown in local currency and varies by region, so check their pricing page rather than trusting a number quoted second-hand.
A different kind of guarantee
Every tool on this site except one processes your PDF inside the browser tab. The engine is downloaded once, and after that the parsing, editing and re-saving happen in your browser's memory on your own CPU. The file is read through the browser's file API and written back out through a locally generated download.
That is not a better promise than iLovePDF's. It is a different category of thing: there is no retention window because there is no retention, and no question about server access because there is no server in the path. You are not trusting a policy — you are removing the thing the policy was needed for.
The single deliberate exception is Webpage to PDF, which fetches a public URL server-side because a browser is not allowed to render another site into a document for you. It takes a web address, not your file. That exception is stated up front, because a privacy claim with an unmentioned carve-out is worth less than none.
Where iLovePDF is the better choice
- Very large documents. A 4 GB file on Premium is comfortable for a server and impossible in a browser tab. If you routinely handle files that size, server-side is the correct architecture and not a compromise.
- OCR on scanned pages. Reading text out of a scan needs a trained model and real compute. This site does not offer it; a scanned PDF here has no text layer, so text editing correctly finds nothing to edit.
- Mobile and desktop apps. Premium includes native applications with system integration a web page cannot match.
- A legally structured signature workflow. Their eSignature product handles audit trails and multi-party signing. The signing tool here draws a signature onto a page — useful and private, but it is not a managed signature workflow with a retained audit record.
Verify it rather than trusting it
Apply the same scepticism to this page that you should apply to any privacy claim. Open your browser's developer tools, watch the Network tab, and run a merge here. You will see the page and the PDF engine load, and no request carrying your document — because there is nothing to send. Then run the same test on any other PDF tool you are weighing up. It is the one comparison nobody can write their way around.
No 100 MB cap, no task counter, no two-hour retention window to think about.
Merge PDFs without uploading them
