A free iLovePDF alternative for files up to 1 GB, with no upload

Every iLovePDF figure in this table is quoted and sourced further down the page. Checked 17 October 2026.

iLovePDF publishes how long it keeps your file and how big it may be on each plan. Plume has no retention window to publish, because the file never arrives anywhere to be kept, and no plans to size it by.

These are exact sentences from iLovePDF's own privacy policy, which the page dates "Last revision: Thursday, February 19, 2026". We checked it on 17 October 2026.

The first quote names the servers, confirms the processing happens there, and gives a hard two-hour window. The second quote is to their credit too: they state outright that your content is not used to train AI models. None of this is an accusation. It is a description of a different design, in which your file leaves your device and something has to look after it while it is away.

The window applies from the moment your document is processed. It covers everything you send: the contract, the payslip, the passport scan, the signed lease.

What they promise

Where the work is done

Read those two together and the shape of the thing is clear. Your document is uploaded, processed on their machines, held for up to two hours, and, if you are outside the EEA, possibly handled closer to where you are. Every part of that is disclosed and lawful. It is also the part Plume does not have, because there is no upload step at all: nothing to hold for two hours, nothing to route to a region, nothing to disclose.

iLovePDF's pricing page carries a full comparison grid. On the Basic (free) plan, the per-task file size limits are these, against 4 GB on the paid tiers for most rows:

15 MB is the number worth pausing on, because it is the free plan's limit for PDF to Word, and a scanned contract passes 15 MB without trying. The same grid caps free batch processing too: 25 files for merge, 2 for compress, and 1 for PDF to Word, OCR, edit, redact and crop. The FAQ on that same pricing page puts it plainly: "The Free Plan gives you access to our core tools, perfect for light use. You can process a limited number of documents."

Plume has no plan tiers, so PDF to Word gets the same room as every other tool. It is not limitless either, and saying otherwise would not be true. Each file can be up to 1 GB, a guard that refuses an oversized file instead of letting it freeze your browser, and below that the real ceiling is your device's memory: a very large scan on an old phone will struggle where a laptop will not. That ceiling moves with your hardware, not with a plan.

Plume's PDF tools are code that runs inside the page you are already looking at. Your browser opens the file, your own processor does the work, and the result is saved straight back to your disk. There is no upload step to secure, no retention window to publish, no size tier to buy, and no Plume server copy for us to retain, lose, or be compelled to hand over.

The engines doing that work, among them pdf.js, PDFium, qpdf and Tesseract, are open source, and our open-source page lists every one with its license.

A privacy claim you cannot test is just marketing. Open any Plume tool, open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and run a file through it. Nothing carrying your document goes out. Or skip the tools entirely: load the page, turn your Wi-Fi off, and keep working. Then try that on any tool that uploads.

We wrote up the full method here, including how to run the same test on any other site.

This page is not trying to win an argument. If you need any of the following, iLovePDF is genuinely the right tool and Plume is not:

1. iLovePDF wins

   Office files going in

   Word to PDF, Excel to PDF, PowerPoint to PDF, and PDF to PowerPoint. Plume converts PDFs out to Word, Excel, CSV, text and Markdown, but it cannot yet take Office files in. This is the single biggest gap.

2. iLovePDF wins

   PDF/A, repair and compare

   Archival PDF/A conversion, repairing a damaged file, and diffing two versions of a document. Plume has none of the three. PDF/A in particular is a standards-conformance job we looked at and decided not to fake.

3. iLovePDF wins

   An API and no-code integrations

   iLoveAPI plus native Zapier, Make and WordPress connectors. If you need document processing wired into a workflow, that is a real product and Plume has no equivalent. An API would mean a server receiving your files, which is the one thing this site is built not to do.

4. iLovePDF wins

   AI summarising and translation

   Summarise a long PDF, translate it, or convert it for downstream AI use. Plume has a PDF to Markdown tool that runs locally, which covers part of that job, but nothing that reads or rewrites a document for you.

5. iLovePDF wins

   Apps, teams and support

   Web, desktop and mobile, plus Premium and Business plans with user management and priority support. Plume is free, has no plans, no apps beyond the installable web app, and is built by one person.

If you came here for one specific job, here is the Plume equivalent. Each of these runs in your browser, and no plan decides how big your file may be.

These are the closest Plume equivalents, not a claim of feature-for-feature or output-quality parity. Converters especially: a server-side engine and a browser-side one will not always agree on a complicated layout.

See all 50 tools

If a free conversion has ever stopped at a size limit, that is the file to test with. No plan here meters megabytes, because nothing here receives them.

Open the tools

Every quote on this page is verbatim from iLovePDF's own pages, checked on 17 October 2026. If iLovePDF changes a policy or a plan limit in a way that changes this page, we will correct it.

• iLovePDF privacy policy (the page states: last revision 19 February 2026)
• iLovePDF FAQ, on how long processed files stay on their servers
• iLovePDF pricing, for the plan comparison grid, the per-task size limits and the Free Plan FAQ
• iLovePDF homepage, for the product and integration listings