filehugger.com103 of our 126 tools never send your file anywhere.
Most online file tools upload your document to a company’s servers, do the work there and send it back. The good ones delete it afterwards. For 103 of our tools that trip is unnecessary, so it doesn’t happen: the conversion runs inside your own browser and the file stays on your device. The other 23 genuinely need a server, and we name them below rather than rounding them away.
Two kinds of tool, both free, neither asking who you are
Change a file
Convert, compress, combine, split, protect. The ordinary work, done well and without a queue.
Understand a file
Tools that inspect instead of change, and hand you a report with the evidence attached.
Same job, different architecture
Those other tools are not villains — they delete what they store, and they say so. The difference here is structural, not moral.
| Aspect | A typical online converter | filehugger.com |
|---|---|---|
| Where your file is processed | Uploaded to the provider’s servers, deleted after a stated period | In your browser, on your device, for 103 of the 126 tools |
| If your connection drops | Nothing works | Client-side tools keep working once the page has loaded |
| File size limits | Capped by upload quota or a paid tier | Published technical limits; browser tools are bounded by your device, not a paid plan |
| Accounts and watermarks | Often required for the useful features | No account, no watermark, no paid tier |
| What you get back | The converted file | The file, plus a report of what changed and what was measured |
| Accuracy claims | Marketing copy | Published method, published numbers, downloadable raw data |
Six more things that come with working this way
None of these are the reason the tools run locally — they are what falls out of it, and each one is checkable in about a minute.
- The tool everyone else charges for Translating a document is the one thing the big converter sites agree to put behind a paywall, a page cap or an account — it is on the paid tier at iLovePDF, Smallpdf and the rest. Here it is free, in 26 languages, with no sign-up and no watermark, and it is not only PDFs: a Word document, an Excel workbook, a PowerPoint deck, an e-book, a Markdown file, a text file or a subtitle file all come back in the format they went in. Those seven are rewritten inside the file rather than rebuilt, which is the part paid tools charge most for. A .docx is a ZIP of XML, so the wording is swapped and the styles, tables, images, headers and page setup are written back byte for byte — a translated contract is still your contract, still editable. A workbook keeps every formula, because the text and the arithmetic are stored in different places and only the text is touched. A subtitle file keeps every timestamp to the millisecond. Check: translate something on Translate Word Document — the file that comes back opens in Word with your formatting intact, and there is no paywall to hit.
- It keeps working when your connection does not A tool you have opened once is cached on your device. Go offline, reload it and convert anyway — nothing here needs a round trip. Check: turn off wi-fi and reload a tool you used earlier.
- The ceiling is your machine, not your plan There is no tier, no daily quota and no queue. How large a file you can handle is decided by your own memory, which is usually far more generous than a free plan. Check: there is no pricing page to upgrade from.
- Batch work keeps the order you chose Drop many files at once, drag them into the order you want, and take everything back as one ZIP. For a merge that order is the page order — the part most batch tools get wrong. Check: reorder the queue on Merge PDF and open the result.
- Every result arrives with its own receipt Conversions carry a report of what changed and what was measured, and the inspection tools export their full evidence as JSON or CSV — with 49 published test fixtures standing behind them. Check: the Download JSON report button on any inspection tool.
- It reads e-invoices that normally need a server ZUGFeRD, Factur-X, XRechnung and Peppol invoices are parsed and rule-checked inside the page, including the German BR-DE rules invoices actually get rejected for. Every free validator we looked at uploads the invoice instead. Check: open the reader and load the published sample.
These 15 tools do upload your file
A privacy claim that hides its exceptions is worth nothing, so here they are by name. If you are working with something confidential, these are the ones to think twice about.
- TIFF to PDFNeeds a full Office or browser-rendering engine. Our application proxy holds the upload in memory, and the isolated conversion engine removes its per-job working files when the request finishes.
- CSV to PDFNeeds a full Office or browser-rendering engine. Our application proxy holds the upload in memory, and the isolated conversion engine removes its per-job working files when the request finishes.
- EPUB to PDFNeeds a full Office or browser-rendering engine. Our application proxy holds the upload in memory, and the isolated conversion engine removes its per-job working files when the request finishes.
- Markdown to PDFNeeds a full Office or browser-rendering engine. Our application proxy holds the upload in memory, and the isolated conversion engine removes its per-job working files when the request finishes.
- Word to PDF ConverterNeeds a full Office or browser-rendering engine. Our application proxy holds the upload in memory, and the isolated conversion engine removes its per-job working files when the request finishes.
- Excel to PDF ConverterNeeds a full Office or browser-rendering engine. Our application proxy holds the upload in memory, and the isolated conversion engine removes its per-job working files when the request finishes.
- PowerPoint to PDF ConverterNeeds a full Office or browser-rendering engine. Our application proxy holds the upload in memory, and the isolated conversion engine removes its per-job working files when the request finishes.
- HTML to PDF ConverterNeeds a full Office or browser-rendering engine. Our application proxy holds the upload in memory, and the isolated conversion engine removes its per-job working files when the request finishes.
- PDF to PDF/ANeeds a full Office or browser-rendering engine. Our application proxy holds the upload in memory, and the isolated conversion engine removes its per-job working files when the request finishes.
- WebM to MP4 ConverterUses a fixed native FFmpeg profile. The upload streams into a random, permission-restricted temporary job directory and is removed after the response, failure, cancellation or timeout; recovery sweeps remove crash leftovers.
- MOV to MP4 ConverterUses a fixed native FFmpeg profile. The upload streams into a random, permission-restricted temporary job directory and is removed after the response, failure, cancellation or timeout; recovery sweeps remove crash leftovers.
- MP4 to MP3 ConverterUses a fixed native FFmpeg profile. The upload streams into a random, permission-restricted temporary job directory and is removed after the response, failure, cancellation or timeout; recovery sweeps remove crash leftovers.
- WebM to MP3 ConverterUses a fixed native FFmpeg profile. The upload streams into a random, permission-restricted temporary job directory and is removed after the response, failure, cancellation or timeout; recovery sweeps remove crash leftovers.
- M4A to MP3 ConverterUses a fixed native FFmpeg profile. The upload streams into a random, permission-restricted temporary job directory and is removed after the response, failure, cancellation or timeout; recovery sweeps remove crash leftovers.
- WAV to MP3 ConverterUses a fixed native FFmpeg profile. The upload streams into a random, permission-restricted temporary job directory and is removed after the response, failure, cancellation or timeout; recovery sweeps remove crash leftovers.
- The optional AI second opinionNot a tool of its own: a button on some inspection tools. It appears only after the local report, runs only if you click it, and sends the extracted text — never the original file.
- The 8 translatorsTranslate Word Document, Translate Excel Spreadsheet, Translate PowerPoint, Translate EPUB, Translate Markdown, Translate Text File, Translate Subtitles, Translate PDF need a server too, but not for your file. The document is opened and rewritten in your browser tab, and only the wording makes the round trip to be translated. The file itself is never uploaded — a weaker guarantee than the tools that never send anything, and a stronger one than the uploads listed above, so it is stated rather than rounded in either direction.
The other 111 — every image tool, every structural PDF operation, PDF to Word, OCR, the inspection reports and the e-invoice reader — stay on your device. Each tool says which mode it uses before you start. Detail lives in the privacy policy and the security page.
What the others charge for, and what they have that we do not
Every figure below is one the provider publishes on its own pages, checked on 26 August 2026. Pricing moves, so the date is there rather than implied. A dash means we could not find it published, not that the answer is no.
| FileHugger | iLovePDF | Smallpdf | PDF24 | Adobe Acrobat online | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What the whole tool set costs | Free | $4/month billed yearly, $7 monthly | $10/month billed yearly, $15 monthly | Free | An Acrobat subscription |
| What you get without paying | Every tool, no task cap | Between 1 and 25 tasks per tool, depending on the tool | Two documents a day | Everything, no published limit | One transaction every 30 days on the premium tools |
| Where your file is processed | In your browser for 103 of 126 tools | Uploaded to their servers | Uploaded to their servers | Uploaded to their servers — they say so plainly | Uploaded to their servers |
| Ads on the free tier | Yes — it is how this is paid for | Yes; Premium removes them | Yes; Pro removes them | — | — |
Translating a document is the clearest single difference, so here it is in full. iLovePDF gives a free account one translation a day, on a file of up to 15 MB, into 25 languages; after that it runs on AI credits, of which Premium includes 2,000 a month. Here it is unmetered, into 26 languages, on eight kinds of file rather than PDFs alone — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, Markdown, plain text, subtitles and PDF — and the first seven of those are rewritten inside the file, so the fonts, tables and layout survive. Both run OCR on a scanned PDF by themselves, so a deck exported as pictures translates without a separate step.
8 things they have that we do not
A comparison written by one of the two sides is worth reading only if it says this part too. Several of these are good reasons to close this page and use one of the others.
- No mobile app and no desktop appiLovePDF ships both — iOS and Android, Mac and Windows — and PDF24 has a Windows program that works with no connection at all. This is a website, and two of the three things an app is usually wanted for it already does: installed on Android it appears in the system share sheet, and the browser-side tools keep working with no connection. What it is not is a program in your applications folder, with the icon and the file associations that come with one.
- No APIiLovePDF sells one as a separate product. If you need conversions inside a pipeline, a cron job or someone else’s software rather than in front of a person, nothing here will help you and theirs will.
- No account, no stored files, no share linksThere is nothing to log into. Results live in this browser and are replaced by your next conversion, so you cannot come back to a file next week or send someone a link to it. That is the same decision as not uploading your files, seen from the other side.
- No Google Drive or Dropbox pickerFiles come from your device and nowhere else. If your documents live in cloud storage, every conversion here starts with a download.
- No signature requestsYou can place your own signature on a page. Sending a document to somebody else to sign, chasing them, and getting an audit trail at the end is a different product, and iLovePDF’s Sign PDF is that product.
- OCR reads 25 languages, not 120English, Turkish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi and Vietnamese — you pick the language and only that model is downloaded. iLovePDF recognises more than 120. If your scan is in one of the other ninety-five, theirs will read it and ours will not.
- We cannot change the text already in a PDFOur editor draws on top of the page — you can add text, boxes, redactions and a signature, and you can black something out for good. Clicking into an existing sentence and retyping a word needs a different kind of engine, and we do not have one.
- Server tools stop at 50 MBThe tools that need a real Office or browser engine cap there, with a fair-use rate of 30 conversions per 10 minutes. iLovePDF Premium takes 4 GB in a single task. The browser-side tools here have no such ceiling — they are limited by your own machine — but the server ones do.
Each of these providers is also written up on its own, one at a time, with the figures dated and the same section on what they do better: how FileHugger compares.
Everything above is checkable
The quickest check takes ten seconds: open your browser’s network tab, run a conversion, and watch that no request carries your file. For the rest, we publish the working.
No tool that promises certainty is telling you the truth
Formats have edge cases, some source files are broken in ways no converter can rescue, and automated analysis has blind spots. So our reports state their own limits: a check that could not be evaluated is reported as not evaluated rather than quietly counted as a pass, and nothing here is a certificate of safety, legal validity or compliance. Where a decision is expensive — legal, financial, medical, accessibility, security — verify the output and involve someone qualified.
The site is free and carries advertising. Ads sit in the reading areas of a page, never between you and your file: result and download screens carry none at all, and no tool is behind a payment or a sign-up. Brothers IT Yazılım Arge ve Bilişim Hizmetleri Tic. San. Ltd. Şti. operates it, and a human answers info@brothers.net.tr.
Pick a file and see for yourself
No account, no watermark, and for 103 of the 126 tools no upload at all.
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